I'm currently reading Sword and Citadel, which is an omnibus of two books by Gene Wolfe; The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch. They are the 3rd and 4th books in his series the Book of the New Sun.
It tells the odyssey of a man named Severian, traveling a world which is very old, very new, and utterly strange, on an evolving spiritual quest surrounding a mythical figure called the Conciliator. It's a dense book, and the way Gene Wolfe writes makes you feel like the text is undulating in your hands while you read it, so a passage you read a moment ago may have shifted since you last read it. Not unlike the way you can feel a snake move when you hold it. It's steeped in biblical and historical references, has wildly imaginative fantasy and strange-technology elements, and while I have needed to regularly look up a lot of new words, it's been a fascinating adventure.
I'm currently reading Sword and Citadel, which is an omnibus of two books by Gene Wolfe; The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch. They are the 3rd and 4th books in his series the Book of the New Sun.
It tells the odyssey of a man named Severian, traveling a world which is very old, very new, and utterly strange, on an evolving spiritual quest surrounding a mythical figure called the Conciliator. It's a dense book, and the way Gene Wolfe writes makes you feel like the text is undulating in your hands while you read it, so a passage you read a moment ago may have shifted since you last read it. Not unlike the way you can feel a snake move when you hold it. It's steeped in biblical and historical references, has wildly imaginative fantasy and strange-technology elements, and while I have needed to regularly look up a lot of new words, it's been a fascinating adventure.