Dick, Macdonald, Leonard (& Adam Gopnik too)

Readers with elephantine memories may recall a discussion on the merits of not-reading and on Oneupmanship. With regard to that latter cause, I present The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, reviewing the Library of America’s new and handsome edition of four Philip K Dick novels:

While he served a fairly long apprenticeship—a series of almost unreadable realist working-class novels that he wrote in the fifties are now back in print—and struggled to make money, from the time “The Man in the High Castle” won a Hugo Award, in 1963, he was famous, admired, and read. He wasn’t reviewed on the front page of the Times Book Review, but so what? Reading his life—either in the reflective French version, by Emmanuel Carrère, or in the thorough and intelligent American one, by Lawrence Sutin—one has a sense not of a man of thwarted ambition but, rather, of a man burning up with ideas and observations who found in a pop form the perfect vehicle for expressing them.