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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm going through Conrad's Lord Jim. Backlog not moving.
Last week I finished Philip K. Dick's Ubik. Since completing my 2025 new year's resolution, I've become much less disciplined about reading: this one took me a full month to read, despite being accessibly written and barely 200 pages long.
I thoroughly enjoyed it. On my edition, the cover blurb is from the (now disgraced) Neil Gaiman, who notes how far ahead of his time Dick was. It's really striking that this book was published at the tail end of the 1960s, decades before its central theme (our fundamental inability to distinguish reality from illusion) became the go-to in Hollywood cinema: The Matrix, eXistenZ, Vanilla Sky, Total Recall*. The latter example is particularly interesting as, although it's officially an adaptation of Dick's short story "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale", it mashes up a bunch of different ideas and themes from assorted Dick novels and stories, such that it might be more accurately categorised as an adaptation of Dick's entire oeuvre rather than any specific work. The scene in Total Recall in which Quaid meets Dr. Edgemar in his hotel room has no analogue in its source material, but seems to have been drawn from a similar scene in Ubik.
When I first watched Total Recall only a few years ago, I remarked that one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much was that I love 90s action movies that are goofy and over-the-top, and I also love sci-fi movies that are existentially unsettling: Total Recall is the first (and to date, only) example I can think of where a movie tried to do both at the same time, and pulled it off. (Any goofiness in The Matrix is unintentional.) This is entirely in keeping with the source material: Ubik, like many of Dick's stories, is an existentially chilling nightmare, but also tremendously silly, with Dick clearly having enormous fun imagining the fashions of the future ("a cowboy hat, black lace mantilla, and bermuda shorts" or "a floral mumu and Spandex bloomers"). It's also, as I mentioned the other week, a tremendously horny book: there is perhaps no author in the Western canon who loved breasts as much as Dick did. The three-titted hooker in Total Recall may have no analogue in Dick's writing, but I can't help but think he would have approved. While Total Recall may not be the best cinematic adaptation of Dick's work (in terms of impact and influence, it's hard to argue with Blade Runner, and I loved its Villeneuve-helmed sequel; Spielberg's Minority Report is excellent, despite having nothing in common with its source material beyond the basic premise), I think it's the most faithful cinematic representation of his aesthetic: chilling, goofy and horny in equal measure. It's a shame he didn't live long enough to see it.
A colleague lent me Hua Hsu's memoir Stay True, and I'm about 80 pages in. Hsu is a second-generation Taiwanese-American who attended UC Berkley in the mid-nineties, where he befriended a Japanese-American fellow undergrad named Ken who tragically died young (although I haven't gotten that far yet). It's well-written and an easy read, but everything about it, from its nineties nostalgia (of course he meets riot grrls in college, of course he's devastated when Cobain dies) and polite airing of grievances about the Asian-American experience feels awfully familiar. I don't expect ever to read it again.
*The 1990 Paul Verhoeven film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, not the redundant 2012 remake with Colin Farrell.
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