This was an interesting read considering how famous the movie BladeRunner is. Things I learned while reading the book. The term bladerunner is not used in the book, it is an invention of the movie. The term replicant was also invented for the movie. Ridley Scott explains why they chose not to use the term android in the director’s commentary of the film but the explanation was not that clear to me.

The book is bleaker than the movie, if you can believe that. People live in a world where animals are scarce, rare and valuable. There is also an entire industry of fake animals. Deckard also has a wife in the novel which puts doubt into the question on whether he is an android or not. Although the scene where an android asks Deckard if he’s ever taken the test on himself is in the book. Ridley Scott states in the director’s commentary that in the movie Deckard is supposed to be an Android, this of course conflicts with BladeRunner 2049 since Harrison Ford has aged, and I don’t think Androids are supposed to age.

My favourite part was the section where there is another police department that Deckard doesn’t know about that is being run by Androids. Or is it the other way around? Deckard is working at a secret android police station and he is an android. This is the beauty of PKD’s writing, he creates ambiguity that keeps you guessing.

Reading this novel was part of an ongoing project of reading one Pynchon novel a year in chronological order of publication. Last year was Gravity’s Rainbow and hear we are a year later reading Vineland. This is my second read of Vineland, but I didn’t remember any of the book except Zoyd crashing through the window at the beginning of the book, so it felt like a first reading. Maybe I was a Thanatoid when I read it, with an attention span of a gnat, and I have returned to the land of the living.

Pynchon’s prose can be so dense at times that it is easy to miss something if your attention wanders. General advice is to push through, as you will not get everything on a first go, repeated reads can be enlightening though. I found Vineland a lot of fun. It has less characters than Gravity’s Rainbow so the only thing you needed to do is watch out for narrative shifts.

Depending on the age of the reader, this book may not be as fun to read for a younger reader as it makes so many television(tubal) references that would take research to understand.

I did find the book took a while to get used to the Pynchon style again but I hit a reading stride around page 200 onwards. Pynchon’s long sentences are really poetry presented as prose at times, and in the right of state of mind reading feels like sailing. This is why I keep coming back to Pynchon, as I have not encountered anything similar in any author.

My second foray into the many worlds of Philip K Dick. I did not enjoy this as much as The Man in the High Castle but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t enjoyable. This book falls under the category of books that would be very difficult to adapt for film although I’m sure a master story teller could find a way.

I found it dissatisfying that precognition figured so prominently in the begining of the novel but faded away in the second half. Maybe this was intentional, that using Chew-Z made precognition not possible as the characters never left the hallucination. Maybe Dick rewrote the story and didn’t have time to fix such a change in tone. The book is definitely ambiguous.

Le Carré novels are quite often adapted for the big screen. His older novels, circa Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy were novels first and became movies later. Chapters were 30+ pages with meaty paragraphs of description. The Honourable SchoolBoy was considered a good book but was passed up for the big screen because it considered unfilmable. It makes me wonder if the author, with all his success at screen adapations, could avoid having the fact that his novel might become adapted to the screen effect the craft of his prose.

Our Kind of Traitor is Le Carré’s twenty second novel and it felt like a victim of this success. It feels more like a novel that was written with the intention of being a movie. At least that was my first impression of the novel. I was not a fan of the first 200 pages which were cuts between an interrogation and past events. I wrongly assumed that it was written this way so that it could be adapted for the screen in the same manner. So, I found the first 200 pages jarring and longed for the meaty dense prose paragraphs of the past. Once, the scenery was set though, I did find the novel flew by.

This novel was adapted into a movie by Canal+, it’s currently free on Tubi if you want to watch it. Have I told you how much I love Tubi? And wasn’t I surprised to watch it and see how much the narrative structure was different. A chronological narrative instead of a bifurcated interrogation. So my theory that the book was written for the screen was really moot.

This book is classified as a thriller but I didn’t find it that thrilling. The only part that gave a real punch was the end of the novel.

Ubik has been on my want to read list for a while now, as I’ve heard it is quite the experience. Frankly, anything by Philip K. Dick has been on my radar for a while now. I’ve been keeping my eye out at the local used book store for several years now but couldn’t find Dick. Eventually I decided to buy new. I ordered the entire Library of America collection of his novels. The collection consists of 3 hardcover books that contain what is considered his best 13 novels out of his full 44 novel bibliography. At $80 for the collection that squares out to about $6 a novel.

This is the second time I’ve encountered a Library of America publication. I picked up the complete novels of Hammett for $1 at a used book sale several years back. One of the criticisms of this issue in the Amazon comments section was that the pages were thin. This made me hesitate when making my purchase decision. I don’t know the techical terms of what type of paper is used, how many grams it weighs, etc, but my best description of the paper is that is similar to bible or dictionary paper. Is it lesser quality? I don’t know, but it has a pleasant side-effect. It makes each volume thinner and lighter. This makes the reading experience more enjoyable as you are not struggling with a big heavy book. The first of the three hard covers is over 800 pages (4 novels) and only about an inch thick.

Now I want to read Ubik so why have I read “The Man in the High Castle”? Well I like to read an author’s novels in the order they were published, when possible, to see their natural progression as a writer. I hope to get to Ubik by the end of the year.

You may or may not be aware that “The Man in the High Castle” is a four season series on Amazon Prime. Before starting this book I had watched some of that series (I made it half way through season two). Watching this much of the series did not spoil the book in the slightest. The divergences from the original source material are so great that they almost feel like two different stories that occur in the same world. In the TV series there is no book but a series of secret video tapes. I can see why they did this, as a book in a book makes sense. When the medium changes to video it makes sense to make the distributed medium also video. In both the TV series and novel the effect is the same, although it felt more effective in the novel. You are reading a book about an alternate history. The characters in the book are reading a book about an alternate history similar to your history. This amplifies your empathy and puts your mind more in the alternate history being depicted.

During a summer trip, on a rainy day in PEI, we visited a bookstore in Charlottetown where I purchased this book. The bookstore looked like a used book store but most of the books were new. The proprietor had good taste in books. It is rare that I encounter any Italo Calvino in a store and was happy to pick up this book. One thing struck out to me later that I didn’t notice during my purchase. The price of $22.99 was written in pencil inside the book. This is what most used book stores do. However the original cover price had been hidden with a black marker. During reading I noticed there was black marker over the original cover price, and rubbed it off to see that the cover price was $17.99.

The book was published in 2001, and I purchased it in the summer of 2024 so I was not upset to be charged more than the cover price. The price of books has definitely gone up in 23 years. The person working there was an elderly woman with an old toy dog in the store, I assumed that she was the owner. I purchased this and Frankenstein, and she said “thank you” when I made my purchase. Most places, when you buy something, the clerk doesn’t say “thank you”. I read a lot in to that “thank you”, which may or may not be true. That book stores have it rough these days with internet shopping and e-readers. It definitely felt like a sad “thank you”, of an older woman that wished she could retire but works long hours at her bookstore.

What’s most interesting about this book is that Calvino disowned it after writing it. Prevented it from being published, then eventually revised it before allowing to be published again. To that end he discuses this in a 30 page preface before the start of the book. Which is a long preface considering the length of the book. I like to read books in chronlolgical order that an author has written them to see progression. This makes this edition a strange book. As this is Calivo’s first book but he revised it 20 years later after he became a more seasoned writer.

The book takes place in Italy during World War II, and follows Italian partisans fighting the Nazis from the mountains. Calvino himself fought as a partisan. The main character is Pin, a child that gets no childhood due to the war. Most of the story is through the viewpoint of Pin however it later shifts to other characters briefly.

I bought this book quite a few years back, and it sat on my tsundoku shelf for a while. I enjoyed Infinite Jest but procrastinated reading this for several reasons. I had apprehension that it would not be very good considering the subject is IRS tax agents. The author took his own life during the writing of this book, so it is unfinished. Did this mean that trying to write a book about IRS tax agents was a near impossible task and shouldn’t have been attempted in the first place? Did this task drive the author to madness? Would I be infected by such madness if I read it?

This book didn’t drive me mad, but it did make me visit the optometrist. The font was so small, and I’m talking about the standard font size, not the ridiculously small footnote font size, that I couldn’t read it with my glasses on if I was laying down in bed, although sitting in a chair was fine, the different positions having different natural reading distances. So as the evening wound down and I chose to read before bed, I took off my glasses and held the book precariously close to my face. I got my eyes tested and purchased my first set of progressive lenses which eliminated this foolish situation and allowed me to finish the book while using glasses. I’m old, my eyes are going, I’m sure my ears will be next.

On the back of my used paperback, purchased for $7.50 at a local bookstore, is a price tag with “9500 KS” on the tag.Some quick searching on the web leads me to believe that this could be the Myanmar Kyat, but I am not 100% convinced. Mainly because I thought it could have been the Kroner and discovered that the currency code for the Swedish Kroner is SEK but if you are in Sweden the abbreviation is KR. So KS could be the regional code in the language of origin, in which case I have no idea what “9500 KS” could mean.

As for the book itself, I enjoyed it more than Infinite Jest, but I would be very cautious in recommending it to anyone that isn’t a huge David Foster Wallace fan, mainly because there is no coherent plot. Stuff just happens. It is a collage of scenes. You are shown many scenes by many different characters, and you are transported to a well fleshed out world, but how these scenes are related is a complete mystery to me. The book is more of an experience than a story, made up of many little stories. Wallace’s writing seems to have progressed since Infinite Jest, things felt smoother, and although the pace was slower (in one part of the book I swear it takes 20-30 pages for a character to travel from the airport to the office via shuttle) I was not put off by this pacing.

What would this book have been like if it had been completed? I don’t know. Would the pacing have been different because the editor would have requested changes? I don’t know. I do know that Infinite Jest is 1000 pages long and The Pale King clocks in at 570 pages. At the pace of the story telling, my guess is that if Wallace had ever finished The Pale King it also would have been 1000 pages long. A review on goodreads states that Wallace’s longtime editor took 1000+ pages of the unfinished manuscript and whittled it down to what was published.

After the failure to read Frankenstein to my son, making his eyes roll into the back of his head, we switched to The Hobbit.
As Frankenstein was such a failure I searched on the line for lists of the best children’s books. The Hobbit came up frequently in the top 10. Life is too short to read bad books. Frankenstein wasn’t a bad book, it just wasn’t a good children’s book. I had read The Hobbit decades ago but didn’t realize how masterful Tolkein’s prose was. All the dwarves arriving at Bilbo’s house did draw my son into the story early, and even sections that I thought would bore him kept his attention. May your beard never grow thin.

During vacation this summer we visited a used bookstore in PEI. My son found Frankenstein and asked if I could read it to him. This melted my heart, the fact that my son picked a book with no pictures and wanted me to read it to him made me feel like I might actually being doing something right, raising a future reader.

I read it to my son but the vocabulary and more old-timey complex sentence structures were too much for him at his age. He was very patient though and lasted about the first 30 pages before exclaiming “Dad, I don’t understand what is going on!!”. Oh well, now we have a copy for when he is older.

A month later I picked up the book and read it myself just in time for Halloween. I found the structure of the book most interesting. The narration is essentially Walton -> Frankenstein -> the Monster -> Frankentein -> Walton. A story within a story within a story, or a valley that you climb down and then climb out of.

I had been looking for some used John Updike for a while but nothing ever turned up until I found an omnibus edition at a book fair, a fund-raiser for women in music. The edition contained the first three Rabbit novels, “Rabbit, Run”, “Rabbit Redux”, and “Rabbit is Rich”. The price was nice too, one dollar fifty. The price was actually $3, but it was the second day of the book fair and what ever was left was marked down to 50% off.

What a find, you might say. But this edition had been abused by its previous owner. Someone had read the first novel and then set the book down face up in between books one and two. This created a distinct crease down the spine and stressed the internal page bindings. To keep the book from falling apart I put duct tape on the spine. I attempted to mend the internals to no avail, the sections slowly came apart as I read.

I did not enjoy reading “Rabbit, Run”. I enjoyed reading Updikes prose, but the actions that Rabbit took and the book ending did not leave me wanting to read the sequels. So I definitely procrastinated reading “Rabbit Redux”. However, I did enjoy Redux much more that Run. This might have been the format. In Run, Rabbit is the agent of his destiny no matter how cringe worthy that becomes. In Redux, things seems to instead happen to Rabbit, and he just lets them happen. In both books you are essentially watching a train wreck but the perspective of Redux makes it a little more enjoyable ride.

I purchased a used copy of Moby Dick and saved it for my summer read some time ago. This summer I tackled the behemoth. Originally published in 1851 (175 years ago), the language is definitely different but not that difficult to read.

The structure of the book, very short chapters, makes it an enjoyable read. I went into this book expecting a simple narrative structure and was surprised that half of the chapters were detailed accounts on how whaling was performed back in the day.

Purchased used from thrift books. My copy had a price sticker with “L-21000” on it. Twenty-one thousand Lira? 200 pages into the book I found a faded receipt from the year 2000. The book was first purchased from a bookstore in the airport in Milan for 21000 Lira before the Euro was introduced in Italy.

I’m assuming the original owner never finished the book, considering the location of the receipt, that they were most likely using as a bookmark. I did finish the book, but it was a slog.

Clocking in at 635 pages this is Rushdie’s longest book. I read that after the critical reception of this book, he expressed regret at the form and vowed never to write a book so long again, which he stuck to.

The first time I read this I was completely discombobulated from the experience and had no idea what I had just read. This was a decade ago, I was busy, busy, busy, living a modern life, working out too hard at the gym and trying to read this before I went to bed. I would never get through more than five pages before I fell asleep.

Reading this book at that slow a pace just didn’t work as this is not pedestrian literature. It requires your attention. It breaks rules, like naming main characters with the same first letter: Pirate Prentice, Pointsman. It shifts the narrative without giving you warning. It introduces characters in the first 200 pages and doesn’t mention them again for 400 pages.

A decade later with some trepidation I decided to take on this book again. But I came armed with a slower lifestyle and less sleep debt. I also read it in conjunction to listening to the now defunct “Pynchon in Public” podcast. I would read my required chapters then listen to the podcast to get some interesting insights.

Another thing I did when reading this book was take breaks. The book is broken into four distinct sections:

1. Beyond the Zero page 1 - 177
2. Un Perm’ au Casino Herman Goering 181 - 278
3. In the Zone 279 -616
4. The Counterforce 617-760

After reading each section I went and read a different book, and I found reading it in this manner quite enjoyable.

RIP - Pynchon in Public podcast.

I purchased a used paperback copy for the sum of six dollars. As soon as I started reading the novel something felt off. Eventually I figured out what was so odd about my reading experience. You see, over time, I have become accustomed to paperbacks of a certain size. 4 1/4 inches wide by 7 inches tall to be precise. But my copy of The Mission Song is much taller measuring at 7 1/2 inches tall.

This slightly different form factor was mildly discombobulating though I persevered, and “got used to it”.

As for the novel, I found the protagonist quite naïve, especially as the novel got closer and closer to the conclusion. Nothing in the novel surprised me but I might be getting too used to the Carré style as I have been reading his novels in pretty close to consecutive order.

Only six left to go and six of them are waiting patiently on my Tsundoku shelf …

Usually with a 700-page book I read it as fast as I can as I find the momentum brings the book alive. I could tell 100 pages in that there wasn’t the level of post-modern complexity ( lots of characters etc) that a sprint read was not necessary. Not only that, I felt that a slow read made it more savoury. It took me almost two months to read and my only regret is that I didn’t take a full three months to read. ;)

I found this book a slog and was sorely disappointed as I enjoyed The Satanic Verses so much and have read it twice. This made me question whether Verses is as good as it seems or if the controversy makes it more exciting to read. But I don’t believe that. I’ve read everything before Verses and although Grimus and Shame weren’t my favourites, Midnight’s Children was a delight.

I think what unnerved me about this book was the choice of narrative style. Why should I care about the narrator and his family? Also, many of the characters in the story die, but I never felt any loss when the characters died as every character felt cartoonish and not real, which is the style of the novel.

I also believe much of the Indian background where the novel takes place made it less relatable to me. Whereas Verses takes place partially in India and partially in London, this takes place completely in India. A country the author was unable to travel to at the time of this writing. But again, I did not find this a problem when reading Midnight’s Children

What I believe we see here is an author struggling, as this was written when Rushdie was in hiding. Publishers were getting killed for the act of publishing Verses and publishing a novel afterwards had high expectations and there was caution about the subject matter. The narrative style makes the actions that occur in the novel seem more distance, less impactful and more cartoonish. This could be intentional as it tones down the critiques of Indian society.

Purchased a paperback for $6 then later found it on hardcover for free in a little free library. Read the first 400 pages by hardcover but then went on vacation and wanted to travel light and switched to my paperback copy.

Definitely a different experience. I would not recommend this to anyone I know. I picked up on circularness of the plot and a couple of other things. Read the plot summary on wikipedia to learn what I missed.

Long, banal and depressing. I started this and didn’t like the vibe. I took a vacation by the sea and didn’t want this to be my sunny read so took ten days off from reading this and read some more jovial summer reads.

So I read it slow at first but then powered through it to get it finished. This was a book that I read and kept with based on reputation so I could put a notch on my belt that I’ve read it.

I read Freedom before this which is also critically acclaimed and enjoyed it. I found the characters in this novel more tragic and detestable at times. As the novel progressed my reading pace increased and I had sympathy for the entire family.

I found out about this book because a female Mossad agent in The Little Drummer Girl reads it and this is mentioned several times. So when I found a used copy for $5 I picked it up.

Did I find this book absolutely enthralling? No. But it kept me reading and I liked that because it was a serial the chapters were short and I enjoyed reading it at a steady pace of only a chapter or two each day.

I can see why John Le Carré referenced the book. Henchard is a tragic character following a tragic path and many of his novels post Smiley’s People are in the same vein.