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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm reattempting Burnham's The Machiavellians. Feeling a need to revisit the roots of neoconservative thought.
Seven years ago, I stopped at a petrol station in Italy and found a discarded copy of Robert Gutwillig's After Long Silence. I decided to take it with me, and it sat unread on my bookshelf ever since.
On my morning commute the other day, I finally decided to give it a go. After ten pages I was already bored, and gave up.
Luckily I'd prepared for this eventuality, and also brought A Canticle for Leibowitz with me. It's a very old, battered copy with extremely fine print, and I'm only about five pages into it. The prose is a bit baroque for my liking, but I'm interested to see what happens next, which is more than can be said for the previous book.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is amazing.
Lots of stories tell you X happened Y thousand years ago, but it doesn't make sense. For example, in A Song of Fire and Ice, where the Night's Watch has been holding the Wall for eight thousand years and the Starks have ruled the north for just as long and I'm like "bro, the oldest organization in the world is the Catholic Church, which is barely two thousand years old, and the oldest dynasty is the Imperial House of Japan, which has been around for fifteen hundred"; talk about medieval stasis!
By contrast, A Canticle for Leibowitz takes place over 1,200 years, and it makes you feel every one of them. Technology changes, fashions change, political factions change, but you can believe that the monastery and the Catholic Church endures, though Rome was nuked in the backstory. It's a very beautiful novel with strong themes of cyclical history and faith. The future imperfect stuff is fantastic; if you liked Scott Alexander's "The Witching Hour", you will love it.
Just do yourself a favor and never read the sequel.
What’s up with the sequel? In general terms please, and spoilers so as not to ruin it for FtttG.
In addition to the other comments, the se-inter-quel also very much has a plot that goes absolutely nowhere. At least that's how I remember it, I read it in 2008 so some time has passed. Still, I do remember much more from other books I've read that year, so that might be a condemnation of its own.
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