What are your favourite Philip K Dick books?

[Durckad]

I've only read one of his books, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and I didn't care for it honestly. The prose is okay, nothing exceptionally bad nor good, the characters are fairly thin, and the ending is godawful and pretty much comes out of nowhere. The story isn't that weird, but there was enough bizarreness there to keep me interested and hoping for a satisfactory conclusion, which, unfortunately, there was not.

I also started to read Eye In The Sky, but nothing in it was connecting with me, so I just lost interest at about the 20-25% into the book.

I have a couple more books of his on my Kindle that I'll probably give him another shot sometime in the future, but right now there're other authors and books that I want to read way more than him.

[maarsen]

12 hours ago, Theda Baratheon said:

The strangeness doesn’t bother me at all - I quite like, in fact, I love strange things but I absolutely agree with you on some of the novels being filed with excellent ideas but then petering out by the end. I loved the ending of Ubik and the ending of Martian Time Slip was disturbing and effective but also kind of...just there. Not...satisfying, I’d say.

The strangeness of Dicks writing is what really attracted me to it in the first place. Logical puzzles, surrealism, anti heroic characters were all things that I found more and more interesting as I grew up. Other SF writers dabbled in it a bit with the occasional logic bending story but Phil Dick made a career, if I can call it that, out of doing it constantly. I just wish he could see how important he has become now. Without the support of other well known writers, he would never have been able to write as much as he did. I am glad you are enjoying his work. But then you have always been someone special to me because of your love of Blade Runner. When it was made, absolutely no one knew who Phil Dick was, and I kept telling people there is more of where this came from.

Now if you can just find a copy of Dangerous Visions, you can be introduced to Harlan Ellison as both a writer and an editor. Now that book was mind-blowing. 

[Theda Baratheon]

8 hours ago, maarsen said:

The strangeness of Dicks writing is what really attracted me to it in the first place. Logical puzzles, surrealism, anti heroic characters were all things that I found more and more interesting as I grew up. Other SF writers dabbled in it a bit with the occasional logic bending story but Phil Dick made a career, if I can call it that, out of doing it constantly. I just wish he could see how important he has become now. Without the support of other well known writers, he would never have been able to write as much as he did. I am glad you are enjoying his work. But then you have always been someone special to me because of your love of Blade Runner. When it was made, absolutely no one knew who Phil Dick was, and I kept telling people there is more of where this came from.

Now if you can just find a copy of Dangerous Visions, you can be introduced to Harlan Ellison as both a writer and an editor. Now that book was mind-blowing. 

The strange and futuristic ideas definitely appeal to me a lot in Dick’s stories and I find it impressive how he manages to fit so much world building and crazy shit in these tiny novels. I’m reading some discworld at the moment and then I think I’ll get back to reading PKD with The Three Stigmata...and Man in the High Castle that are currently staring at me right now from my book shelf