In today’s dead-tree New York Times (but apparently, based on the online date stamp, yesterday’s pixel edition), writer/editor Dana Jennings invokes the spirit of Philip K. Dick to illuminate his feelings about living with prostate cancer:

This is the way prostate cancer often feels, as if my world had turned into a Philip K. Dick dystopia in which the cold intent of many people—especially my insurer and the other bureaucrats who populate the health-care-industrial-complex—was to translate me into an abstraction, to deny my damaged and tiresome flesh-and-bloodness.

I have no idea whether or not Jennings—the author of this year’s bestselling Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death and Country Music— is a science-fiction reader or fan, or just happened to pick up the Dick meme from the movies, but regardless, I think Dick would have been amused to have been conflated with a disease.

Particularly that one.

Yesterday’s New York Times contained an Op-Ed piece by James Gleick which for the most part had little new to say, merely recycling platitudes we’ve all already read elsewhere.

But the piece, titled “How to Publish Without Perishing,” did contain one passage which, while it may also be obvious to you, seemed new to me:

It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.

I’d never thought of it in quite that way, though I’ve often thought something similar—that is, we love the wine, and not the bottle.

And so the text is more important than the clay tablet upon which it is baked, the sheepskin scroll on which it it inked, the book in which it is printed, or the pixels of which it is made.

If nothing else, at least that one concept of Gleick’s stood out.

Joe Queenan writes in an essay titled “Enough With the Sweet Talk” in The New York Times that the main problem with book reviews isn’t the wrongly negative critique but rather the falsely effusive one:

Books are described as being “compulsively readable,” when they are merely “O.K.”; “jaw-droppingly good,” when they are actually “not bad”; “impossible to put down,” when they are really “no worse than the last three.”

Authors are described as a cross between Madame de Staëland and Arthur Conan Doyle, or are said to write like Charlotte Brontë on acid, or have out-Dostoyevskied Dostoyevsky and checkmated Euripides, when they are more of a cross between Candace Bushnell and Ngaio Marsh, or write like Willa Cather on Robitussin-DM, or have been narrowly out-Mavis Gallanted by Mavis Gallant, and were lucky to play Edna Ferber to a draw.

I’ve always said that I’d rather be hated for what I am than loved for what I’m not, but now it strikes me that I wouldn’t mind some unearned praise now and then …