Last and First

Rigoberta Menchu: I, Rigoberta Menchu

This last book of 2008 makes me want to revive my old content/style rating method for books. The content of the book was strong, the riveting story of a Quechua woman who fought for native rights in Guatemala. Dictated, rather than writeen, though, the book lacks style rather terminally. This is understandable, since Menchu had only been speaking Spanish for three years when she narrated it and was utterly uneducated, but it still keeps this from being worth reading other than as a curiosity. My World Literature class has been such a success so far, I decided to read in their entirety some of the books of which I taught on ly excerpts, and this one was easy to knock out on a single plane flight.

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

I have to give this one a poor grade by comparison to Dick's masterpiece Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? While the latter transcended typical ideas of literature, the former ultimately relied on a single technological conceit, and fell short of my recommendation. It felt as though Dick almost followed the same formula to write the two books. Although the two protagonists are ostensibly polar opposites--the hard-boiled detective and the glitzy celebrity, the end up with the same quandaries about their realities, and ultimately end up feeling the same. The worlds created for the two books likewise feels interchangeable, although the irradiated world of Sheep ties more nicely into its theme than the police state of Tears.

What originally irritated me about Sheep, however, I longed for in Tears. the lack of resolution in the former resounded with the whole text to create a truly thought-provoking statement about the nature of reality. While Tears treated the same topic--as I suspect all of Dick's work does, it ultimately didn't take it beyond typical science-fiction fare.