August Read: A Canticle for Leibowitz
Waiting for this one to come in via ILL.
I went back and forth on whether or not to include this one. Some descriptions sound amazing, others I shy away from. Now that I'm about to dive in and flipping through some more detailed summaries, I'm pretty sure this is a book I need to read, and not just because it's considered a seminal piece of speculative fiction. My worry now is that it won't live up to my expectations.
The book starts out hundreds of years after a nuclear war, the fall out of which was beyond the immediate cost of life, nuclear contamination, and environmental destruction, but extended to a rejection of intellectual growth and invention. Leibowitz smuggles, archives, and protects what he can, and the basis of his work later becomes a monastic order, and even further in the future we see it in the face of another nuclear war.
This will not be a light happy read. That's OK, I deliberately chose light fare for July, and there's a value to well written darkness and despair.
I went back and forth on whether or not to include this one. Some descriptions sound amazing, others I shy away from. Now that I'm about to dive in and flipping through some more detailed summaries, I'm pretty sure this is a book I need to read, and not just because it's considered a seminal piece of speculative fiction. My worry now is that it won't live up to my expectations.
The book starts out hundreds of years after a nuclear war, the fall out of which was beyond the immediate cost of life, nuclear contamination, and environmental destruction, but extended to a rejection of intellectual growth and invention. Leibowitz smuggles, archives, and protects what he can, and the basis of his work later becomes a monastic order, and even further in the future we see it in the face of another nuclear war.
This will not be a light happy read. That's OK, I deliberately chose light fare for July, and there's a value to well written darkness and despair.
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