Books Before I Diary: Philip K. Dick

[martinskidmore]

Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

His best title ever, for me: Dick was second to Wodehouse in numbers on what I hope is only my first pass at a before-I-die selection, and I wouldn't necessarily have guessed in advance that this was the one I most urgently wanted to reread. It's still wonderful: less for the SF stuff (a TV star

Comments

[rechabite]

It was the same situation at my school viz. prizegivings and book tokens. However, since those prizes were given out purely on the basis of our exam marks, personality issues, etc., never came into the reckoning; I’m sure that if they had, The Authorities would have found every excuse to include me out. In my fifth year I won the Logan Memorial Prize for English, which back then was a pretty major deal (front page of local paper, etc.), and also the Halton Prize for Latin, and my sundry book tokens were expended upon, inter alia, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human and Derek Bailey’s Improvisation: Its Nature And Practice. As I recall it, the prizegiver (some Rotary Club worthy whose name I’ve long forgotten) simply pretended not to see the books she was giving me, but there were definitely some heads in hands among the teachers up on the podium.

[martinskidmore]

My headmaster did ask me after the first time I won that maths competition and bought books like that if I wouldn't rather buy something more respectable, which I obviously ignored. As it happens, the next year, when I won it again, one of the books I bought was a Sturgeon novel (I just checked and found the plate in it). More Than Human is an old favourite of mine, and may well crop up in this review series in the future.