Dan's Updates en-US Thu, 03 Apr 2025 13:32:59 -0700 60 Dan's Updates 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Rating843462835 Thu, 03 Apr 2025 13:32:59 -0700 <![CDATA[Dan liked a review]]> /
Dan liked sophia's review of two Palestinians go dogging:
two Palestinians go dogging by Sami Ibrahim
"someone said it before but it gives of „all lives matter�. wouldn’t recommend it to anyone whose interested on the gaza conflict. "
]]> Rating843459860 Thu, 03 Apr 2025 13:23:54 -0700 <![CDATA[Dan liked a review]]> /
Dan liked sophia's review of A Boy's Own Story (The Edmund Trilogy, #1):
A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White
"this is about a real outsider - not the romantic punk version of a rebel but about a weird, shamingful perverse longing.

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]]> Rating843457437 Thu, 03 Apr 2025 13:16:23 -0700 <![CDATA[Dan liked a review]]> /
Dan liked Anton Roe's review of The Devotion of Suspect X (Detective Galileo, #1):
The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino
"I’ve given this a 3 but it’s more a 3.5.
The story and plot is great, especially the final twist. I just felt it focused a little too much on developing the relationship dynamics between the characters and not enough on the depth of characters themselves."
]]> Review5917028220 Wed, 18 Oct 2023 08:18:10 -0700 <![CDATA[Dan added 'The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick']]> /review/show/5917028220 The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick Dan gave 3 stars to The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (Hardcover) by Philip K. Dick
bookshelves: journal-diary, paranormal, philosophy, singularities
First, a little background. Philip K. Dick was a mid-twentieth century writer of science fiction who is probably best known in association with movie adaptations based on his novels--Blade Runner, for instance, is based on Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In February and March of 1974, Dick experienced several mysterious events that he spent the remaining nine years of his life trying to explain to himself. These attempts to understand the meaning of the events took the form of eight thousand pages of written notes in which Dick speculated on what had happened to him and what that might reveal about the nature of reality.

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick represents about a tenth of those notes, edited to minimize repetitiousness while still showing how Dick's mind would circle back to certain ideas, developing and refining them further as he came upon new information that could be incorporated into his system, which draws not only upon classic Greek philosophy and Biblical texts, but also from Martin Heidegger, Gnosticism, and even some of Dick's own fictions, written years earlier, but reinterpreted following Dick's mystical experience as evidence for his speculations.

In a note, one of the editors suggests that The Exegesis resembles Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. I have not read this latter, but I have seen passages from it, in Sigmund Freud's Three Case Histories, and this does seem to me to be a fairly useful comparison (other books this reminded me of include The White Goddess, Foucault's Pendulum and Pale Fire.

The Exegesis is a mixture of mystical and religious thought, philosophical speculation, literary commentary and conspiracy theory. It might have been the Russians. Or aliens. Perhaps we are living in a computer simulation. Or perhaps Dick experienced a "divine invasion."

I took my time with this one, and generally liked it well enough. I do not think I would re-read it any time soon, but I would be interested in re-reading Dick's VALIS (a semi-autobiographical work based in part on Dick's 2-3-74 experiences), as well as Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and the Lawrence Sutin biography of Dick, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick.

Acquired Mar 2023
abebooks.com ]]> ReadStatus6643342203 Sat, 27 May 2023 14:06:43 -0700 <![CDATA[Dan has read 'Deadeye Dick']]> /review/show/5578035346 Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Dan has read Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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