this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
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Taste?
I loved it; it's in my "classics" list. But I loathe Game of Thrones - both the novels and the TV series, and those were wildly popular with a lot of people.
It's just personal taste; I'm not sure there's an explanation.
I was taught this lesson by "anything written by Dan Brown".
As a regular reader of fiction, when The Da Vinci Code blew up in popularity I had all kinds of people around me telling me how amazing it was. I read it and was very disappointed. Its okay, but fairly formulaic and two-dimensional characters. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it doesn't stand out as exceptionally good like I'd been led to believe. Then I realized none of the people recommending it to me were regular readers. So to them, it likely was amazing. If they read more often of other authors they might have been equally if not more amazed by better books.
That didn't stop Da Vinci Code nor the follow up Angels and Demons from being commercial successful and very popular books.
I get that taste has a lot to do with it, but usually when I read one of the SF "classic", even though I don't like it I can see what other people like in it. Ubik is really one of the first where I didn't understand this. I just read an article saying that what I consider a lack of connections between the different part of the story is in fact a writing effect, to make readers have a "dreamy feeling" while reading the book. I hadn't considered it that way, and was looking to analysis like this, I'm not trying to tell people my taste is better, just wanted to have their input on the book
And it's pretty typical of Dick. He often wrote surreal stuff.
I get what you were asking; I just don't know how to answer the question. Mind-bending, byzantine stories are a matter of taste, just as gritty grimdark is.
The first time I read Ubik, I was younger and the plot device hadn't yet been endlessly copied in other books; it wasn't obvious to me what was going on, and I enjoyed the voyage of discovery, and the novelty of the style. It sounds like you figured it out early, and that reduced your enjoyment of it. You can only experience that once, though, and now when I re-read it knowing how it ends, and what's happening, I can still recall how great it was the first time, and that makes up for the spoiler effect.
I think I understand a bit better now, thanks for your interesting comments !