Phili K. Dick, just a local writer

Our September title is Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" The movie Blade Runner was adapted from this novel.

It was a surprise to me that this story is set in San Francisco and that Philip K. Dick is considered to be a local writer. He went to high school and college in Berkeley in the 1940's.

This novel takes place after the humans have done a good destroying their world so most people have moved to Mars. Dick was in high school when the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan so I can understand where the the image of a world filled with empty apartment buildings and kipple might come from. Post apocalyptic stories are a favorite theme for science fiction writers. They get to create their new world from the rubble or fly off to another planet.

After reading this book I have a new, wonderful appreciation for spiders. The scene where the android, Pris, cuts off the legs of a spider one, by one is right up there with any other torture scene. Because the earth is such a mess real animals have died off. Caring for the few animals left has become a religion. It's miracle Isidore has found a living spider in his decaying apartment building only to have it cruelly disasembled by an android.

More to come...

You call this a blog?

After months of blogging I have finally read a description of a good blog. They are "frequency, brevity and personality". I fail the first two but I think "personality" shows through. I'll work on the other two, oh lucky reader.

I have fallen behind. In the last installment I was sorting through our light, summer read, Michael Lewis's "The Big Short". At our July meeting Jeannie L. used a quote from the book to sum up the financial mess :

"The upper class of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody ever said, 'This is wrong.' " Page 232

I think that says it all.

Our August Title was George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London." Another "light " read.

I find this book really uneven. The first half when he is working in Paris as a "plongeur" is lively and interesting. The people and situations are vivid. He's really working and making an effort.

In the London half of the book he borrows old clothes so he can be a tramp to see how the out of work survive in England. I guess it's more of an expose of the life of the British unemplyed and how the system doesn't work.

My copy of the book lists it as fiction. It reads more like "gonzo journalism". Perhaps Orwell was just ahead of his time. Thank you Hunter S. Thompson.