Gene Wolfe: these books are basically the Dark Souls of reading

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Gene Wolfe: these books are basically the Dark Souls of reading

Vertigus: Jan 8, 2011

Xenix posted:

Has anyone read Home Fires? What did you think? Someone gave it to me for my birthday and I blazed through it but ended up feeling disappointed. There was so much coincidence in the story that it was obnoxious. Wolfe always writes a lot of dialog in his novels, but in Home Fires I feel like he did way too much story telling via characters after the fact rather than showing the events as they happened.

I just finished up Home Fires a few weeks ago and thought it was really mediocre. I mentioned in another thread that it was like reading a David Lynch movie - the conversations between the characters are surreal and meandering, and the book is full of monologues where the main character takes several pages to describe exactly how he came to a certain conclusion. The story never really goes anywhere interesting and the sci-fi setting seems completely superfluous. I found nothing in it that encourages deeper reading and analysis, like in The Wizard Knight or New Sun.

Wheeee posted:

Book of the New Sun is the only work of Wolfe's I've read and stands as the only piece of genre fiction I've ever read that truly transcends the genre. Where should I go from there?

Honestly I'd say that New Sun is as much "genre fiction" as Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It really ought to be considered a classic.