Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Finished more of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. A little more than halfway through the story. Am impressed at how easy a read Philip K. Dick is. Reading this out of the gorgeous Library of America edition, the third novel in a collected volume: Man in the High Castle, Ubik, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are the other three. Read in Man in the High Castle prior to this one, and enjoyed it, would teach it, but am really jazzing on Androids.
I saw Blade Runner years ago, and don’t remember disliking it by any stretch of the imagination, but also am certainly no devotee, and, other than Deckard likely being an android (no huge spoiler there, I hope), remember very little.
Besides being an easy read, something that has surprised me about Androids is the question of economic equity being raised. I had always thought of Dick as more of an “idea” author, who played with perception and reality. I have been pleasantly surprised to find him dealing with social issues as well. Not as overtly as, say, Aldous Huxley, but enough for me to notice it. I’m thinking particularly of the Sidney’s catalogue wherein the list prices of animals- real animals- are for sale. Kind of an eerie blue-book quality to it, as is the corporation (the Rosen corporation) which owns everything and can afford to own everything. Will this (the book) all come down to the Rosen Corp. protecting its own interest? I tend to think so.
He (Dick) makes more use of and reference to art, which is something I am starting to appreciate in books. In Man in the High Castle, one of the crucial plot points (as much as the book has a plot) revolves around a book; the main characters are art dealers, and the I Ching also plays a major role. In Androids, Deckard is particularly moved by The Magic Flute, and the opera is discussed in a little bit (all right, very little) of detail, and it’s more humorous in parts, again, than I would have expected given what I knew about Phillip K. Dick. From near the beginning of Chapter Nine (p. 504 in the LOA edition): “The moor’s slaves—in other words the chorus—had taken up their song a bar too soon and this had nullified the simple rhythm of the magic bells.” Also, consider how descriptions at the Edvard Munch art exhibit lets us into the possible psyche of the androids, a partial description from Ch. Twelve (pp.528): “The creature [in Munch’s “The Scream”] stood on a bridge and no one else was present; the creature screamed in Isolation. Cut off by—or despite—it’s outcry…. ‘I think,’ Phil Resch said, ‘that this is how an andy must feel.’” In order to further let readers into android psyche, he also describes, on the same page, Munch’s “Puberty,” which I must look up as soon as I’m done typing this! “…a drawing of a young girl, hands clasped together, seated on the edge of a bed, an expression of bewildered wonder and new, groping awe imprinted on the face.”
Final thought for tonight: something that made me happy: the placating television force in Androids: “Buster Friendly and the Friendly Friends” talk show. Now one just knows Stephen Colbert has read Dick; Colbert is one of the biggest nerds alive, and that just made his “Steve Doucey and the Friendly Friends at Fox and Friends” routine just so much better for me.