Another year, another list of books.
Far and away the best books in this list are the four making up the series The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe. It had been a long time since I had read epic fantasy that felt as enormous as worlds are supposed to be, and as weird.
Joe Hill
NOS4A2 (2013)Albert Camus
The Stranger (1942)T. C. Boyle
When the Killing's Done (2011)Leo Frankowski
Cross Time Engineer (1986)Stanislaw Lem
Solaris (1961)William Poundstone
Labyrinths of Reason (1988)Walter Alvarez
T. Rex and the Crater of Doom (1997)Bill Bryson
A Walk in the Woods (1998)Gene Wolfe
The Shadow of the Torturer (1980)Gene Wolfe
The Claw of the Conciliator (1981)Gene Wolfe
The Sword of the Lictor (1982)Gene Wolfe
The Citadel of the Autarch (1983)Philip K. Dick
The Man in the High Castle (1962)
8 comments:
Awesome, you read Gene Wolfe! I'm slowly re-reading the Book of the Long Sun right now, which is my favorite of his works which I have read.
Josh— It's hard to overstate how much I enjoyed The Book of the New Sun. Thank you for recommending Gene Wolfe!
It's been said that you don't really read his books, you RE-read them. I'm discovering the truth of that now, and I'm sure if you were to read them again, you would only deepen your appreciation (and understanding!) of what he was doing.
Josh— Kinda of like Dune.
Especially if you first read DUNE in Jr. High school. I had no idea what was going on at the resolution of that novel when I first read it!
Josh— Totally agree. The moral ambiguity of Paul Atreides and the other “good guys” in Dune went over my head as a teenager. Ditto the ecological theme. Indeed, while reading The Book of the New Sun, I wondered how little sense I would have made of Severian's ambiguity if I had first read the book as a teenager—as I had read Dune.
Do you know that he wrote a coda to that series, called URTH OF THE NEW SUN? It sort of explains some of the big ideas in NEW SUN, but sort of makes more mysteries in the process.
I'm pretty sure I would have made neither heads nor tails of NEW SUN as a teenager. I can't claim to have plumbed its depth to any great degree as an adult, having only read it once.
Josh— I'll keep it in mind. Tonight I'll start The Sorcerer's House. Beyond that, I have no definite plans to return to Gene Wolfe. Maybe this year, maybe another.
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