Books I've Read Recently: May 2026
Ubik (Phillip K Dick, 1969)
I think this is the first Phillip K Dick book I've read and unambiguously liked. It's about a group of people who work for a sort of anti-psychic security company. The company is run by a man and his wife who is kept in cryogenic storage somewhere between life and death. This "half-life" state is depicted as a temporary, fleeting thing. This contrasts with the more common power fantasy of cryogenic storage letting people live forever.
As with most of Dick's books, there are lots of ideas thrown around, and a brain melting sense of disorientation throughout. One really striking creative choice is the detailed descriptions of the characters bizarre clothing. Perhaps Dick was trying to extrapolate from the big shifts in fashion that happened in the 60s, or perhaps it's there to emphasize the sense of unreality and wrongness of the whole thing.
I'd love to see an anime-ish adventure game adaptation in the vein of Danganronpa, if only for people's surprise that all the absurd outfits are entirely book-accurate.
Consider Phlebas, (Ian M Banks, 1987)
This is the first of Iain M Banks' Culture novels, which are fairly well known and influential space operas. I was hoping to like this one, since it's the first in a long series, but I really struggled to get through it. There were a lot of really good scenes, clearly Banks can write. The chapter about the Damage game was a particular standout. Damage is a sort of high stakes poker game played with human lives on a planet about to be exploded, where players can manipulate each others emotions. The book's climax is also a set of excellent action scenes, including a particularly tense one involving a runaway train.
But man, I could not get into any of the characters. The protagonist Horza is driven by ideology to go to absurd lengths to find a McGuffin (though it is possible the book did explain why it was so important to find the thing the characters were chasing and I either missed or forgot about it), but I never really felt like I understood why he felt so strongly that he neeeded to do all that.
The action and worldbuilding were compelling enough for make me want to attempt to read the next book, even though my lack of investment in the characters made this one such a slog.
Digital Minimalism (Cal Newport, 2019)
Like a lot of self-help books I've read, the actual ideas in "Digital Minimalism" could probably fit in a blog post, and it feels like there's some padding to get it up to book length. I definitely skimmed through parts of it.
That said, I appreciated that the emphasis on what the author calls "high-quality leisure" rather than productivity. I found that the actual method it recommends (taking a break from pretty much everything online you can for a month, then re-assessing what you actually want in your life) to be a useful way to try to develop a more thoughtful relationship with being online. Though to be fair, I decided to pick and choose how much I actually wanted to do.
"Digital Minimalism" gave me a feeling of having permission to take a break from things like watching YouTube, which I enjoy and want to continue to be part of my life, but had become something I was spending excessive amounts of time on. So the book gave me a useful framework for doing something I kind of already wanted to do..