Robert Silverberg, Dying Inside

About: A man born with telepathy finds himself in middle age losing his powers. The novel explores how being able to dig around in people's brains has impacted him, for better or worse, and what it's like, losing that power, to become just like everybody else.

Verdict: I love the concept of this book—it's a great idea to build a novel around—but I didn't love the hippie-dippie persona of the narrator. More importantly, many parts of the book feel like padding, most conspicuously the chapters that reproduce in whole or in part the term papers that the protagonist sells to undergrads at Columbia to make a living.

Publication: 1972 · 304 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars