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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Gene Wolfe: these books are basically the Dark Souls of reading
 
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DFu4ever
Oct 4, 2002

rufius posted:

I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels like some of Wolfe's stuff is non-sensical.

I've read three of the four books in BoTNS. I read the first three in succession and then took a break. I'm struggling to convince myself to finish the fourth. I found the writing of the first three interesting but at times tedious. I hate leaving things unfinished but I can't seem to get up the energy to focus on the last book.

A bit of a necro quote, but I am left feeling pretty blah after finishing the first book of the BoTNS series. I'm guessing from the love you guys are showing the series that there is more to it than meets the eye, but from a straight writing and story standpoint it's been extremely lackluster.

The characters are not terribly interesting. Severian reminds me of the Plinkett Episode 1 Review when they asked people to describe Qui Gon Jinn. There is really nothing much there to describe outside of literally describing who he is. Considering he's the guy narrating the tale, it's pretty damning that his characterization has been so poor. Dorcas, so far, is basically 'mysterious plot device the character'.

Also, the book itself just kind of ends out of nowhere. I'm not entirely sure what the climax was. The duel? The play? I've read books with odd writing, but this comes off more like bad writing than just being intentionally weird and obtuse.

EDIT: And another thing...the setting itself is interesting, but poorly described. I'd love to know more about it, but Wolfe so far has proven to be terrible at writing in a way that helps you visualize just about anything with any level of clarity. I do, however, have a perfect visualization of Severian's fuligin cloak because it's described repeatedly throughout the book.

DFu4ever fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Feb 26, 2013

* # ¿ Feb 26, 2013 19:35
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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Gene Wolfe: these books are basically the Dark Souls of reading