This is, as the author himself puts it, “a very peculiar book,”  but for me, it was an unusually quick read, I think partly because of its very oddness. First, the good: I found it fascinating. I found it fascinating how Carrère sketches out what he understands to be the relationship between Dick’s life and his writing, a pattern that immediately brought to mind Rudy Rucker’s notion of transreal fiction — fiction that is essentially SFnalized autobiography — as he discusses it in this essay. Well, and as I mentioned recently, Wikipedia claims Rucker came up with the idea after reading …