Go back

So I was reading this for a long time. I don't actually know when I started it.

I think that each book of the series was worse than the preceding one. Nightside of the Long Sun was fantastic, but they kept getting less interesting as they went along. I bounced off the start of Lake of the Long Sun, later forced myself to pick it back up (after maybe a year) and then forced myself to power through because I wanted to be able to read Book of the Short Sun.

I was surprised by how much of this I didn't like. There are a few things that stick but

1. I think of Gene Wolfe as a puzzle box writer, similar to later Nabokov, but halfway through this book I think I understood pretty much everything that was going, and there didn't seem to be any deeper layers that I'm missing.
2. Gene Wolfe seems to be much better when writing from the first person. He is a unreliable narator merchant, and I know that there is technically an unreliable narator of this book. But we know so little about him that we can't read into the authorial voice much at all. And the writing is still in the second person, in a boring voice.
3. The attempts to write specifically about war, battles, etc in what is a fairly grounded setting is kind of embarassing to read. I know nothing about small scale urban warfare, but I can tell that Gene Wolfe knows even less.

What did I like? The gradual unveiling of what and who the gods in this world are is fun. Enough mystery to sustain two books, not three.