How come Philip K. Dick is so fucking boring...

How come Philip K. Dick is so fucking boring? I heard so many good things about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Man in the High Castle, and I picked them up and tried reading Androids.

I couldn't stand the horribly bland and monotone prose, and I didn't like his dialogue either. So I skim read the fuck out of it and then went onto High Castle thinking it was just the book that was the issue, and the High Castle was even worse. It was such a great premise, but it was ruined by how boring he wrote it. I got to page 70 before I had to put the book down. I don't like not finishing books but I just couldn't take this one anymore. It was just too dry. I like being entertained whilst reading.

Anyone else think he's kinda boring?

I just finished A Scanner Darkly this morning and was just about to make a thread about how much I thoroughly enjoyed the book and Phillip K Dick as a writer.

It could have been that I was over-enthused by the story and content of the book, I've recently been quite interested in drugs and its effect on the brain. Maybe he's just not your thing or maybe he is just mine.

I dunno. I'm starting to think that maybe reading novels in general just isn't my thing. I have to actually sit and psyche myself up to read most of the time. Or force myself to complete novels(force myself to read 50 pages a day).

Sometimes I'll find a novel I actually really like, like Dune, and I'll not have to force myself to read it, and it'll just be on my mind all day and I'll want to read it all the time, and that's wonderful, but that's too far in between.

If it makes you feel better it's among one of like 5 books in my life that I started reading and couldn't stop until I finished it (for most people reading every single book under the sun isn't their thing).

I've read a large portion of the "classics" and great pieces of literature ancient and not, though with a mostly western focus sadly, and never really found any of them to be something I wanted to read, this clearly fits into your category of not top interest.

My advice would be to find things specifically that you enjoy or that relate to things you enjoy rather than reading things based on its superimposed literary value.

Do you like sci-fi, political thrillers, social commentary, books about ethics or philosophy (and what kinds of philosophy), non-fiction or fiction, etc.

I've found that I kind of like the coming of age story. The books I've really enjoyed were things like Dune, Ender's Game, and The Gate Thief. Sadly they're mostly all just young adult shit.

Well go through the list of recommended reading on Veeky Forums wiki and find things that are similar to those, I was just looking through it earlier and saw some coming of age books in there, or at least one that was female focused.

I'd give more recommendation if I could but Dune and Ender's Game are two top tier books that you'll probably have a hard time finding equals to. I'm not huge into those sorts of books myself so I don't know much more than that they are pretty much top tier.

Tbh Ubik is pretty great and it's the only thing he's written that I've really liked.
I couldn't help but laugh at the descriptions of what people were wearing throughout the story, especially because it's just dryly delivered

Ender's Game is top tier? People in this thread seem to be shitting on it harshly

People come into Do Androids Dream Of Electric sheep with too many preconceptions from Blade Runner. It is a different aesthetic.

Also, The Man In The High Castle in nearly unique among his work, for having a lot of research, time, and editing poured into it. This leaves it feeling less exuberant and nutty than his other works.

You ought to read something that is more representative of his wider work, with no baggage. If you want the strung-out and amphetamine-fueled books about dubious realities, you need to read The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, Or Ubik.

Hah well don't forget you are on Veeky Forums where as previously mentioned, superimposed literary value trumps good books and the less pretentious the worse it is. Like most clubs or hobbies or anything in life, people like to create arbitrary barriers into their hobbies to prevent newcomers which usually comes off as an aura of being a snob and being pretentious.

In lifting for example people usually try to get newcomers to focus on squats and deadlifts rather then upper body exercises they'd enjoy and get more fulfillment out of. In literature you tell people to read all the difficult and older things that are harder to digest because newcomers aren't worthy of the cheap fun or digestible and enjoyable books.

It applies to all aspects of life, people want other people to have to do experience the same journey they did, listening to pop music is unacceptable because you need to dig deeper and find things of higher value, the list goes on.

Lots of books are great and easily digestible, lots of books are great and hard to get into, don't let people misguide you on what's good or bad when what is most important is your own fun and your own enlightenment.

Enders isn't anywhere near top tier, but it's not complete trash either.
It's not going to be life changing or anythingand it won't offer any kind of valuable insight into, well, anything, but you might read it and say, "well I was entertained!"
And then you might move onto the others books in the series and read those at your leisure.
This is Veeky Forums and opinions will polarized, elitist and overwhelming autistic
>tl;dr:
Is it something you absolutely must read with valuable insight? No. Not at all, but it is entertaining.

of course the prose is bad, the dialogue is stiff and the characters are the same person over and over. pkd is not a writer you read for his skill, but rather someone like lovecraft, someone you read despite his weaknesses because he's an interesting weirdo and his obsessions are pouring out of these books, bad prose or not. mostly he's kind of an anit-science fiction writer where instead of the usual techno-empowerment fantasies you get weakness and confusion, you get technology amplifying petty human shittiness. people find his particular form of alienation continuously (and perhaps even increasingly) relevant and the fact that he's clearly struggling and mostly failing to adequately express himself is part of the appeal. there's something real special shining through all those garbage novels he wrote and if some of it gets through to you you'll know why he means a lot to people and if it doesn't then you won't.

Dang that's a great description, his struggle to express himself is a great way to put it. I was reading some of the background of A Scanner Darkly and it took him 2 weeks to write it and 2 years of editing it with a ton of help from his wife before publishing it. It was meant to be a half autobiography of his experience with drugs in the 70s but doesn't fully captivate the amount of emotion he clearly wants to portray. And his view of the then-future sci-fi world is just as you say.

Read Ubik, it's his least boring novel.

I have read like 6 books wrote by him and for now my favorite is "A scanner darkly", I enjoyed the story ,the characters and the themes.Regarding " Do androids dream of electric sheep's", I liked it only when I've re-read it.Much weirder and different than "Blade Runner", I also appreciated it because it's some kind of proto-cyberpunk book(and I love this genre).
At last,I didn't like much " The man on the High castle" because I expected of course a totally different book,maybe I'm gonna re-read this too.

Androids and High Castle are not Dick's strongest, and High Castle especially is not representative of most of his SF. Both books have good basic ideas but they have no follow-through on those ideas. Androids is hampered by some of his clunkiest 60s writing, while High Castle just runs out of steam halfway through but keeps lumbering on. It's a pity that so many try Androids first because of Blade Runner. If I'd tried that one first I might have given up on him at that point.

The first two PKDs I read were A Scanner Darkly then Game-Players of Titan, solely because those were the ones my local library had in. Those ended up accidentally being a good intro. As others ITT have recommended, Ubik is also a good one to start with.

He's a trippy burnout whose dead inside and claimed to have cosmological revalations while on drugs. What did you expect?

Listen to his interviews

Philip K. Dick Interview with Gregg Rickman

Rickman Interviews Dick about his studies and thoughts on Philosophy and Theology and about Dick's works. Dick discusses the question "If God did not exist in what way, if any, would our experience of reality change?" Some topics include simulated reality, causality's non-existence, the illuminati as god and benign conspiracy theory, Rosicrucianism and Parmenides, Dick's exegesis, the dream state and the unconcious, a Hebrew based supercomputer and information processing, Spinoza Schopenhauer entropy and the will to survive, Greek myth and the god Pan, the works Ubik, Valis, Maze of Death, and a lot more

Same. I tried reading Scanner darkly and maze of death.

Made it 20 pages into the first one before marking out. 5 into the second. His prose is wooden and his dialogue is even worse. I have no idea why he's so well regarded when even Vonnegut is like Joyce compared to him.

>marking out

what do you think that phrase means?

I don't get it, I read PKD's books in a day, usually. They get really gripping usually after the beginning, I was the same when I first started reading his books (The Simulacra, he just introduces so many different plots and characters at first, and the characters are barely differentiated so I was like "wtf Dick, stop being a dick"), but for some reason I felt compelled to read more of them and eventually I realized that once you get to about the middle, they're impossible to put down, so I always force myself to go past the boring beginnings. I've read maybe 20 of his books by now, a few obscure ones, and want to read everything he's written, not just forcing myself to, but because his books are fun. The strange thing, though, is that if you run out of steam in the middle, it's really hard to jump back in. It's either finish it in a day, or finish it very slowly and reluctantly in my situation.

If you keep reading, you'll get hooked on them, in my opinion.

I'm kind of a PKD junkie so if anyone wants to ask questions, shoot, but I might get back to them in a long while since I'm going to naptime soon.

Since it seems no one's gonna ask questions and I'm beat, I want to point out one interesting thing before I pass out.

The first time you properly read Philip K. Dick's books (not boredly and very slowly), I think the reader's often struck by how bizarre, frightening, and darkly comical his works are. Reality is malleable, can change, and the comical situations that happen aren't just slip-on-a-banana-peel-late-to-work routine, but that mixed with metaphysical terror: you're late to work because aliens have transported you to a different universe where everyone's skin is blue and yours is still the same color and no one seems to notice it. Yet the more I've read his works, the more I've become desensitized to the strangeness of them, come to see them almost as normal. Indeed, our lives are often like PKD novels, if we would admit it. But what comes out in the work after you've gotten past the bizarreness of them is a genuine warmth. It seems paradoxical, but they're genuinely warm.

ya if only people could write like u then the world would be rockin

>You have to be a writer/highly esteemed writer to criticize literature.
Please kill yourself.
Literally the same shit as
>You can't talk bad about x's movies because you aren't a movie director!!!!!

Yeah, same here. I used to enjoy his books when I was younger. Recently, I got a hankering for Dick and started Scanner Darkly, but I just couldn't read it. The prose is so bland. If you want to read something good that is comparable to Dick, read Jonathan Lethem's Gun with Occasional Music. It is heavily inspired by Dick and combines it with Raymond Chanler-esque writing.

It takes a dull mind to feel boredom. Just read it while thinking of anything exciting. When I'm in lectures taking notes I think of myself as a lone captain in a spacecraft drifting across empty space and watching the stars in the far distance.

He's a terrible writer. He should have just written outlines and had a ghost writer execute them.

People rate him so highly because he's been used in the movies.

>People rate him so highly because he's been used in the movies.
Yes, amazing classics of kino such as Screamers, Screamers: The Hunting, Next, Paycheck, Impostor, and Radio Free Albemuth. Who does not remember those pinnacles of art?

How can one who writes so crudely talk of 'prose', really, this is the excuse of one who doesn't know how to critique properly. Dick's prose was adequate for what he wanted to say, I'd argue he's a fine writer.

>i suck pkd's dick

ITT: retards who have no business offering criticism and no idea what they're talking about.

Not seeing the value of PKD is pretty serious. Check yourselves.

Fantastic rebuttal friend

I had the same issue as OP with Man in the High Castle, but these posts make me want to give him another go. Thanks.

>Hah well don't forget you are on Veeky Forums where as previously mentioned, superimposed literary value trumps good books and the less pretentious the worse it is.
While it is true to some extent that posters are often pretentious redditors, Enders Game is far more 'pretentious' than say Everything That Rises Must Converge or Dubliners. Both of those are much simpler and much less into the 'big questions' and shit like that and are loved more than Enders Game.
>Like most clubs or hobbies or anything in life, people like to create arbitrary barriers into their hobbies to prevent newcomers which usually comes off as an aura of being a snob and being pretentious.
This is true, but again, partially. There's a very large amount of >genre fiction posters who really do judge based on something completely arbitrary, but there are also a lot of people with genuinely refined taste who do understand what they do and do not like, why and can explain such thing. Disliking Dune and Ender isn't particularly pretentious or related to >genre fiction as it's easy to have a coherent criticism of both.
>In literature you tell people to read all the difficult and older things that are harder to digest because newcomers aren't worthy of the cheap fun or digestible and enjoyable books.
The two are not necessarily conflicted at all, there are a lot of classics and quality sf which is well written and entertaining. When a newcomer comes he will often get recommendations that fit those parameters.
>Lots of books are great and easily digestible, lots of books are great and hard to get into, don't let people misguide you on what's good or bad when what is most important is your own fun and your own enlightenment.
I can't see why entertainment would be particularly important. Literature is for the most part not entertaining and it isn't something you do to kill the time. The pleasure derived is intellectual because it challenges you and retrospective because it isn't done for immediate enjoyment. Literature isn't porn, it's not just entertainment and it serves much more on the personal level compared to most other things you can do.

Obligatory