#Reading log
2016-12-01: Last week I heard about The Man in the High Castle on Imaginary Worlds. A TV-Series depicting how the world may have looked if Germany and Japan had won the Second World War. This sounded very interesting and I learned it was based on a book by Philip K. Dick. I’ve read one of his books a long time ago, VALIS, and I liked it. So I decided before starting to watch this show, I would read the book. It’s set in 1962, seventeen years after the war. North America has been divided with the German ruling the East and the Japanese ruling the Pacific Coast. At the middle there is a kind of neutral zone where no government is ruling. The book follows a handful of characters in this parallel world. It describes their background and how they fit in to this society. The book’s strong part is how vivid it paints up this alternative history and makes it very real. But I was sadly disappointed with the plot. The characters storylines felt scattered and disconnected and I didn’t get much out of the book’s final resolution. Still, I am very interested to watch the show and see how they took this story and remade it for the screen.
2016-12-05: It’s a bit complicated to read but I like style of the plot. The book follows several, at first seeming unrelated, characters but as the story evolves their business gets more entangled with each other. I like this style because my mind need to be alert to the details. It’s an enjoyable achievement when I’m able to foresee the connection between two characters beforehand. I don’t know if I like or don’t like this book. It’s got a complicated writing style so it’s hard to get through but the world that Philip K. Dick is pretty wild. Very interesting to read about how the world may have looked if the Germans won the war.