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3.92 AVERAGE
3.92 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book ambles almost aimlessly. So slowly. Our hero is now on the road (finally!), and I quit when he started on a discussion with the reader of different versions of the lore of his land. I don’t care. I find our hero kind of interesting, but beyond him I don’t really care about anything. And it’s all so random. Kind of Alice in Wonderland ish. He keeps running into new colorful random characters, and his journey has just started. Maybe it’s a bit similar to if Frodo stopped on the way to the Prancing Pony to give an explanation about how many different versions there are of the history of the elves. Just no. I don’t have the patience necessary for this book. Too little payoff.
Wolfe gets right to it with character - not world, not idea, not plot, but Severian, limited and confused little torturer boy that he is. Through character we are drawn into a world extremely alien only in that it is being described as unfamiliar, photos of the moon landing, references to His Girl Friday, whole histories sitting unrecognized before the people of Urth. Superstition runs wild, consensus reality shattered, and it is here that the work really shines: the characters you're entrusting to mediate norms for the audience can't be trusted. It is not that you are being lied to, it is that the characters you are in conversation with are not of the same compass, moral definitions and ethics violated in ways that ask the reader to stop assuming of the world, and begin observing. It is this intent that guides the prose, slipping from acidic to dream-like as Wolfe hops from episode to episode, and as I complete my first read of the first half of The Book of the New Sun, I anticipate wild and wonderful ideas about Protagonist Syndrome and 20th Century conceptions of Individualism to take it to the lands of an All-Timer.
What really sets it apart for me is that Wolfe's use of fantasy isn't wholly concerned with making plausible magic systems or feeding you lore, it is more about misconstrued technology, guns seen as fire lances, etc, that brings the fantastic to us - what we are dealing with is man's tendency to surrender to superstition, to limit one's own knowledge and perspective by settling for magic.
What really sets it apart for me is that Wolfe's use of fantasy isn't wholly concerned with making plausible magic systems or feeding you lore, it is more about misconstrued technology, guns seen as fire lances, etc, that brings the fantastic to us - what we are dealing with is man's tendency to surrender to superstition, to limit one's own knowledge and perspective by settling for magic.
Book was slow and the story wasn't that exciting, but that isn't the point of this story, it is a journey and journeys aren't fast, they don't end overnight, they take months and feel like a drag sometimes and while they are times that I wished the book move faster, once I was done, I appreciated more because it felt like I made the journey with Severian. Also I really appreciated the respect Severian had for his trade. He was a torturer but that was his job, he did it to the best of his ability but as he says, took no pleasure out of it other than the knowledge of doing his job well, and I thought that was a very interesting mindset.
Not sure what to think of this book. Some parts were good, others I had no idea what was happening.
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
| Arguably one of the least best covers this series has had, why oh why. Severian the Torturer exiled for letting the woman he loved commit suicide earlier than she was supposed to meanders across Urth taking in the sights and sounds and people, occasionally executing some of them. It's extremely readable and the story has a logic all its own that's far more literary than the usual plot-heavy genre stuff we love so well, and yet under it all it's still a fantasy-type adventure in a Dying Earth setting, it just happens to use symbolism and archaic language a lot and is occasionally ambiguous, which certainly add to the texture of the experience, yet there's a sense that the plot is there, it's just hidden via sleight-of-hand, albeit that could just be the absence of plot-tokens, or rather the plot-tokens are there, their plot significance is left unstated. Anyway, it's great and weird and frustrating and sometimes quite disturbing. I've never had the sense that it's some great puzzle waiting to be solved, and analysis of the symbolism and imagery isn't the same, but it is a sort of exploration of language and imagery and symbolism, which are puzzles of a sort. Do I contradict myself? Perhaps. Or do I? No. Or do I?
slow-paced