PKD is so good at taking insane ideas and breaking them down into digestible and fun bite-sized pieces. Not one to start with since the experience is more rewarding if you are familiar with his work.

Don't do drugs kids. I think the moral of this book is that I need to be reading his earlier work and not the books written in the last few years of his life. There was something about this that somehow reminded me of Charles Bukowski (obviously not known for his sci fi)... just the people hanging about having random conversations, being off their faces on their poison of choice (be it booze, drugs...). I've read other books where he's had a plot that's good but is also obviously trying to get out all these ideas on spirituality, God, the nature of being etc etc. In this case it feels more like a book about his ideas on spirituality, God, the nature of being etc etc and also trying to get out a plot. Maybe I'm the wrong type of person for this type of book, maybe I like to think more rather than having all these mad ideas spelt out to me. Who knows? Yes it's a good book on some levels, but did I enjoy it? Not particularly.

So, it's about Horselover Fat (a name I thought was randomly stupid, but towards the end you find out that it does have meaning) who does drugs, gets messed up when women he knows commit suicide, tries and fails to do himself in, and ends up in an asylum for a short period. Then he has all these revelations about God, the nature of the world etc - pink lasers, VALIS, King Felix bla bla bla... At times it's written in the third person, then in the first - he does make a point of saying I am Horselover, but I'm writing in the third person. Then he's writing about himself and Horselover being two different people. All this is reflective of his state of mind I guess. He's cured in the end, and the two merge into one, before the Philip part realises it's all a load of nonsense and Horselover goes off travelling the world to find God. Does this sound like a lot of plot? A lot of it is conversations, the random meanderings in his head and all this nonsense he wrote down in this book, like he's writing the bible or something.

Bottom line: really not my thing. Surprising as I've enjoyed all the other books by him I've read this far.

An interesting book. Originally I was wondering how PKD was going to handle topics of mental health and then theology. Ultimately, I didn't think the book ended as strongly as it started. For each reference I connected I'm sure there were many others I missed. Maybe I would have understood the story better if I had brushed up on my philosophy and theology before reading VALIS. In the end, while it was an interesting book with interesting ideas I wasn't engaged by the end and I don't plan on reading the rest of the trilogy.

To daje wyobrażenie, czym kończyły się nasze dysputy teologiczne. 

Trójka źle poinformowanych ludzi sprzeczających się między sobą.

I liked this for the first few pages. It was a really odd book and the craziness appealed to me. But it pretty quickly drifted into philosophy, and I got the impression after awhile that it wasn't going to drift back, that the entire book was made up of the religious philosophy of a smart schizophrenic. Which is not a book I can get into. Probably made it through 50 pages before giving up on it.

So far, this is my favorite of the three PKD books that I've read. The others (UBIK and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) were more conventional sci-fi, with a scattershot approach to both world-building and plot that left me feeling that both were a bit underbaked. VALIS skews more autobiographical, and feels a lot less preoccupied with a central narrative. Therefore, PKD can get away with a little more crazy abstraction than I usually 'let him' get away with. The book deals with an experience of PKD's where his personality was apparently bisected, and only a mysterious case of divine intervention makes him whole again. It's a strange read. The plot itself is not wholly satisfying. But along the way PKD's observations about himself, the world, and theology are valuable, and there's not too many dull moments. In the end there really isn't much of a moral to it all, either - we don't get resolution on the existence, if any, of VALIS' supernatural elements. It's really a book about the author's mind being dynamited, and then forcibly put back together by the aforementioned. That might sound boring to some, and to be sure there are some of the typical issues I have with PKD's work - particularly his use of women as mere plot devices a lot of the time, but it's an engaging read. I have a lot of issues with PKD and I'm really not sure what I think about him, but I can concede that if nothing else, the act of reading his books is something I find enjoyable.

This is a difficult and ultimately unsatisfying book. There are elements there that are quite good, but nothing that isn't ultimately done better elsewhere. For the proper Philip K. Dick feeling the touchstones ought to be 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch', 'Ubik', and even 'A Scanner Darkley'. I'm not sure why VALIS often gets recommended to people as a starting point. I despised it the first time, thought it was mediocre the second, and now have a more or less conflicted opinion. I think it suffers from insufficiently critical editing. Were large portions of this reworked with greater objectivity on the part of the author, it'd probably be a stronger book.

¿quieres un libro complicado que te haga pensar y que posiblemente te cueste mucho entender? aquí lo tienes.
Porque es un vistazo al interior de la esquizofrenia consentida y da mucho miedo.

Ahora, dificil de leer es un rato largo