Yesterday evening I read Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. It turned out to be the perfect text for me at the moment. The characters' shared questioning of human existence and their understanding that one can never truly know the right way for sure, but must do one's best to find direction and just enjoy the ride was a message I needed to hear. I would love to teach it in a Literature and Religion course.
On a more concrete level, I enjoyed the novel's depiction of collectors because I love to collect things (especially books!). It is the best fictional portrayal of collectors/of the feel of collecting--the passion, the obsession, the tactile joy of the experience--that I have read, better than Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man. I freely admit that I sometimes seek solace from life's difficulties in material culture, and the book does an excellent job of portraying collecting's function as a form of (sometimes necessary) escapism. I also loved the book's consideration of "place," both as a geographical entity and as an expression of one's status within society. Place is a desperately important concept, but too few people realize this. The book's metafictional aspects (it revolves around a novel that is its exact opposite) are also delightful, an early example of American postmodernism. Well done.
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