Read All The Books Aaaaaah! discussion

I'm reading this book on the recommendation of a SF booktuber, but then again, based on the other books that I've read on his recommendation in the two years it took to get through the waiting list for this book at the library, maybe this will only strengthen the notion I have that my tastes don't align very well with his.

Moid's comments on the author, and on this book:

"Philip K. Dick. I don't know, I think he tells a story in a very unique way. I think people will still be interested in Dick in the future."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k40ut...

"The Man in the High Castle. I'm a bit surprised it's that high [on the list], because I think a lot of people pick this one up maybe because of the TV show, or maybe for their first taste of Dick, and they don't really get along with it."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfsU1...

I don't know about this so far. The prose is strange, with frequent dropped articles, even between different characters.

Here's Robert Childan's PoV:

Have to shut store, he knew as he hung up the phone. No choice. Have to keep goodwill of such customers; business depends on them.

And here's Frank Frink's PoV:

Try to get to bathroom by other route, he thought.

Hoping to get some nicer prose soon.

I'm 17% through, and so far it seems to have been little more than world-building. There are a lot of PoV characters, and I'm having trouble keeping track of who's who, because they're all just going about their daily lives with nothing special going on while Dick gradually feeds us information about what's different with country borders and race relations in this alternate history. There's a lot of race stuff in this book -- that may in fact be what the book is about, but I can't tell yet.

The lack of articles seems to mostly be when reporting characters' internal thoughts.

I think maybe the plot may be happening now. A character just got a fortune telling that some big disaster is going to happen, like another world war. That's of course only if we're meant to assume that divination actually works. In this book, everyone takes it seriously, but only in the form of the I Ching / Yi Jing. Which in itself is a strange choice considering Japan rules the country, not China, and in fact, it was firmly established that Chinese people have low standing in this society.

This book sucked! There were about 5 different storylines going on with different sets of characters, and only one of them was mildly interesting, and it was the only one that even went anywhere! There were a bunch of isolated events here and there (only near the end, really), and none of them even mattered. Tagomi shoots a couple of nazis, then experiences the Mandela effect in a park, then has a heart attack, but he'll live. The end! Childan runs an antique shop, half-heartedly tries to seduce another man's wife, gets a chance to make a lot of money, but opts for the dignity of fine art instead. The end! Frink makes counterfeit antiques, then switches to original custom jewellery, then gets arrested by the nazis, then gets abruptly released with no reason given. The end! Occasionally these characters touch on each other's lives.

Then there's the interesting plot, with Juliana and the titular man in the high castle, who's not even living in his bunker anymore. She goes to warn him of an attempt on his life, and he says he won't do anything about it because if they want him, they'll get him. And she learns that he wrote his alternate history book entirely by casting lots on the I Ching. The end!

Basically none of the big events that were foreshadowed throughout the book ever happened, and the book just ends.

And the prose was clunky and irritating, like I mentioned before.

Oh yeah, and most of the alternate history is just infodumped on us by characters explaining it to each other by comparing it to the book-within-a-book's alternate-alternate history.

After finishing the book, I learned that Dick wrote this book the same way the man in the high castle wrote his -- he chose events based on whatever readings he got from casting lots with the I Ching.

Utter waste of time.