12 Philip K. Dick Books RANKED

this is a surreal and uncomfortable place to be but I think the book does a great job of balancing that with some very funny dialogue and moments of empathy the themes explored in this book I think were very personal to PKD as he explains in an afterward you know his life people around him were affected by some of the things depicted in the book and I think that emotion really came through in the storytelling this book had a big impact on me

it uses one of my favorite devices of his where we the readers are trying to solve the same Mysteries that the characters are at times I did get frustrated with some of these characters but I felt like their shortcomings were believable in this High Press situation and I was on board to explore you know go on this journey of failure and Redemption and trying to answer these bigger questions to do with life and death this is another one that I enjoyed a lot

I think this book does a lot of things well just not sure it quite Masters all of them for me it's slightly below a couple of my favorite PKD books but I still loved it I'm going to put it in a tier

it has some high points but something that I like in some of his other books is how he's able to balance some of these darker themes the grimness of the world with a little bit of empathy a little bit of Hope or positivity and pretty much everyone in this book is rather unlikable it's a heavy read the tone is pretty consistent throughout there's not a whole lot to root for or be hopeful for in this book and I think I just wanted a little something to latch on to in order for this to emotionally resonate a little bit more with me I still like this one overall

it also has a lot of those classic trippy PKD elements and I think the way the various threads come together in the second half of the book are really satisfying for me the only things that held this book back were the first half I felt was a little slow to get going

I read Radio free album youth first and I found the first half to be really engaging then in the second half as it starts to go down this kind of more abstract path I'm not sure it quite all came together and that may have been part of the reason why it wasn't initially published when he first wrote it

when I was able to kind of then get on board with where the book was going I liked it ended up being less about kind of the state of the world and it being a bit more of a religious spiritual internal Journey that the book went on and I like that I just don't know if the puzzle pieces ever fully fell into place for me

for me this book was a little bit hard to get into because even though pkd's books are usually really short and tight this book I think is under 200 pages there were just so many characters and I do like his characters in some of his books but I felt like in the penultimate truth they didn't really have distinct voices and so with so many characters that all kind of sounded the same I started to confuse them I got a little bit lost

I really resonated with the themes how it was tackling things to do with loneliness and the different ways in which we try to connect with other people I think the ending pays off as well this is one of my favorite PKD books it's going straight to S tier

I did like some of the surreal elements it was a little bit un easy the atmosphere was good there's some nice twists here and there but I think just the Thematic payoffs the plot payoffs I didn't quite connect with as strongly as I do with some of his later books and I did find some of the characters just a little bit annoying but I still enjoyed reading this one

Ubik feels like one big mind game it gets off to a little bit of a slow start but when strange things start to happen the nature of reality starts to shift it feels like one big rabbit hole that I just couldn't help but go down once things really take off in the second half I think I finished this book in one sitting

this is a philosophical book with a lot of poignant things to say but I think overall for me this is a book that I perhaps respect for how ambitious and unique it is as opposed to something that I fully personally connected with