06.03.08
Books – big and small
I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. A great read. He definitely has a very unique style. For example, he doesn’t like the use of punctuations. Fast read too.
In the end, I figured I should go to the nearest bookstore and pick up a couple of his books. Also, it had been a while since I did some aimless browsing. Picked up a couple of his books. Looked around. I wanted to pick up another Philip K. Dick and a Kurt Vonnegut book. Thats when I ran into a strange problem. I couldn’t remember which of their books I owned! I own probably half a dozen of their books. Unfortunately, I am one of those people who will sit and read books in a store. So when I picked up a book that I thought I didn’t have and flipped through it, I got the feeling that I had read it before. In the end, didn’t buy any of their books. Bummer ’cause I really was in the mood to read PKD.
More browsing. A few more books. This time the classics. Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers. A book, I have to confess, I still haven’t read yet. Made a note of it and told myself that I will check out which translation is the best.
Made me think about huge books. Once you have read them, it is very difficult to read them again. There are times when I wanted to read Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo again. Too big. Thankfully, I underlined and bookmarked a lot of the passages that I liked.
These days when I am reading a book that I own, I carry a pencil with me.
I do wonder how the future will be like for readers like me. I don’t think I would ever be satisfied with a simple reader. I would want something that I can underline and write on. I wonder.
04.14.08
Three stigmata
Have been reading one of my favorite authors: Philip K. Dick. The book is – The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. I am still working my way through the book. I have read a few of his books but this is the first one I am reading, wherein he gets into religion and such. Like almost all other PKD’s works, this one also involves the use of drugs.
In classic PKD fashion, he questions reality – a reality that we all perceive around us. It reminded me of the arguments presented by Morpheus, Oracle, the Architect, and of course by the Merovingian. The simulacrum, the hyperreal as Jean Baudrillard tried to describe it once. My initial reading of the Upanishads gave me the feeling that those early philosophers were working on the same thing.
Back to PKD. In the book, he describes a psychotic/ hallucinogenic drug called Chew-Z which evidently lets a person to live his/her life again and again as he or she wishes. So far, the caveat has been that the guy who sells the drug, Palmer Eldritch, seems to be in control of everyone’s so-called reality.
Anybody who has listened to Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb or Echoes on repeat play when one is suitably drugged or drunk will understand this loss in perceiving the real and the gain in perceiving the real.
