REQUEST: Gene Wolfe recommendation

Kai Ivo Quale · 19 Jan 1993, 20:29 · from sf-lovers.1993.mbox

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: kai at ifi.uio.no (Kai Ivo Quale)
Subject: Re: REQUEST: Gene Wolfe recommendation
Date: 19 Jan 93 20:29:18 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v18-86-10 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V18 #86
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-18a

My personal fave list:

(I have read just about everything by Wolfe, but these are the ones I
remember on the spur of the moment.)

_Book of the New Sun_    RAVE! PANT! DROOL! Easily the best he has ever
                         written. 

_The Island of Doctor    Incredible. I don't like collections; I love this
Death and other Stories  one.
and Other Stories_

_Soldier_ series         Very good.

_Free Live Free_         Good, but extremely confusing. Not for the
                         beginner. 

_Castleview_             Good, but kind of light for my taste.

_There Are Doors_        Not bad (Wolfe is never bad), but I don't think he
                         quite pulled it off this time. I kind of waited
                         for things to start rolling, and then it was over.

_Book of Days_           Ranges from the very good to the so-so. 

_Fifth Head of Cerberus_ I found this one rather disappointing compared to
                         his other work. An early effort, isn't it ?

_Peace_                  The only Wolfe I've ever found completely
                         unreadable. 

Wolfe can be very confusing. The way of reading Wolfe that works for me is
to "ride the wave": Don't worry if you haven't got the faintest clue of
what's going on - that's normal :-), just relax and enjoy the experience.
It IS enjoyable even if you don't understand a thing, sort of like Kafka.

Kai Quale
kai at ifi.uio.no

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net