At the head of each section or chapter is a mock advertisment set almost like the verse that accompanies the prose sections of Mennipean satire. For example, the eleventh:

Taken as directed, Ubik provides uninterrupted sleep without morning-after grogginess. You awaken fresh, ready to tackle all those little annoying problems facing you. Do not exceed recommended dosage.

Reads like a prescription for reading Ubik. Like a prescription for reading.

Not. quite. It's not simply about reading. May not be about reading at all.

How to avoid reading for epynomous ubiquity? Gregory Ulmer in a reprise of his piece in The Anti-Aesthetic in Teletheory provides a clue:

Cage seems to be making a point similar to the one Barthes made in S/Z with respect to the risk in reading. Sarrasine, having mistaken the castro Zambinella for a woman, dies "because of an inaccurate and inconclusive reasoning": "All cultural codes, taken up from citation to citation, together form an oddly joined miniature version of encyclopedic knowledge, a farrago: this farrago forms the everyday 'reality' in relation to which the subject adapts himself, lives. One defect in this encyclopedia, one hole in this cultural fabric, and death can result. Ignorant of the code of Papal customs, Sarrasine dies from a gap in knowledge.

This is the last instance according to the record of the index to Teletheory that there is a mention of S/Z in the book. Fitting. never to mention the book S/Z again after referencing the death of a character. But that is not the end. Barthes goes on. Sarasine dies, yes. From a gap in knowledge, yes. And to the point: "[...]from a blank in the discourse of others."

Reprise. There appears here a blank between a failure of reasoning and a risk attributed to being in a state of reading (the risk in reading). "Sarrasine, who has persisted in proving to himself La Zambinella's false femininity by these enthymemes, will die because of an inaccurate and inconclusive reasoning: it is from the discourse of others, from its superfluity of reasons that he dies." (Barthes, trans. Richard Miller). A defect in the discourse.

Granted, there is always a hole in the cultural fabric. Death arrives, always. Timing however depends in part upon dosage. And dosage depends on how the blanks are read and re-read.

Reading is not a collecting of reasonings. At least not all reading is. Reading is not always about ingestion. Certainly not about incorporation. So what is this thing to be taken as directed? A smidgin from a fictional world. A world which may or may not mimic with fidelity the actual world, or the known actual world, or the knowable actual. A sliver of language and a recommendation for use. The causality seems to cry for an intermediary.

Just can't quite make "risk in reading" mesh with "risk in a reading". Back formation, perhaps?! The risk in swimming is abstract, future-directed; the risk in a swim, immediate. The everywhere that is here is worrisome. It's a paranoid construction. A very Dick theme. The everywhere that is there is manageable. Very Barthes to find a punctum wherefrom to think, to reason and to read. A no place. A place for the forever death prone

Utopia demands an abdication of paranoia and defection from the tribulations of error.