/lit/ - Literature

Reading "The Claw of the Conciliator" right now.

I feel like I'm almost forced to read it slowly, just a few chapters in a sitting. Maybe this is me being a pleb, but Wolfe's prose is very dense. I love it so much, but I feel I can only manage a certain amount of it at a time before I must come up for air.

Genius and fool alike have been subjected to the excruciations of my guild. Had you told them at the time that their suffering was not real, they would have assured you it was real enough. However, if you ventured into our necropolis to tell them so now, they would not answer you, for these multitudes of genius and fool rest there all the same, in silence.

Just finished "The Shadow of the Torturer." I'm almost apprehensive about starting "The Claw of the Conciliator," because I know at the end of the first book things were on the verge of going to hell, as Sevarian himself admits.

But of course I have to keep reading. It's already my favorite book series ever.

And while BotNS isn't really underrated here on /lit/, I always get the sense that broader fans of fantasy and sci-fi don't think about it much.

Dear il/lit/erates, would you care to discuss The Book of the New Sun?

I'm re-reading Shadow and I've been noticing all these wonderful details I hadn't noticed during my first feverish read. All the symbols and dreams that had gone unnoticed,

I have to say Borges' influence on Wolfe was much bigger than I thought. Not only metaphysics are intertwined in the narrative -it even features mirrors and labyrinths-, the writing also becomes circular and contradictory. Yet these paradoxes are full of a meaning that cannot be put into words. The only writer I know uses them as much is Borges.

And of course, there is Ultan. I had to smile when Ultan describes how he joined the Curator's guild. He says:
>I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure, in time, until I spent most of my hours searching for such books.
Those are almost the exact same words Borges used in many interviews when asked how he became interested in literature.

I also corrected the mental image I had of Terminust Est. I thought it was much longer than it in fact is (the length of a medieval longsword).

I'm getting ready to start The Book of the New Sun, /lit/. But I heard once that there's a companion work that goes with it, something that helps make it a little less obtuse. Does such a thing exist? And if so, should I get it along with the four books?

>>3281666
That may be the best explanation of what the narrative and plot structure was in (and got me to love) Hyperion, and I'm finding in BofNS. Nice contribution!

Just finished reading The Book of The New Sun. Now everything that's not written in first-person seems WRONG and BAD. Help me /lit/. What are some good books written in first-person?