A few family deaths and accumulated illnesses and bad experience can really do a number on people. I also don’t think making great art is easy. But I don’t think this is always true and it would be heartbreaking to take the dream away from everyone about ever becoming a full-time novelist. Maybe keeping a job keeps a writer honest or at least in the public watching and note taking. While I haven’t read Bleeding Edge, his most recent novel, Inherent Vice is wild and excellent.
There are rumours about him being both a professor or exCIA but I’m sure he’s been reasonably well off since the late 70s. I think someone like Thomas Pynchon shows that an author can very well be producing very good work well into the old age. I’ve commented on that before here so I won’t get into it further than to say that the world isn’t interested in middle aged musicians which in turn affects the work. The vast majority of recording artists are never able to match the music they recorded in their 20’s. I think there is some truth to this but I wouldn’t argue to keep a day job as a writer. That's from my recent reads (so few last years). Ann Leckie - Ancillary Justice (but only this, the other book was worse)
Playclaw 5+ series#
Jemis - Stone Sky and the other two in the series Vernon - A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep Anything by Naomi Novik (so just two books right now) Cixin Liu - Three Body Problem and the rest in the series - I loved it, never read anything like it Hemingway - I read just The Old Man and the Sea (or actually was forced in school to read it) - and this was a short novel about basically nothing, boring as it can beĪnd books I really liked that are not on your list: Kurt Vonnegut - never read anything by that author
Dune - the whole series, each book is unique in its own way Earthsea - good, but it is mostly for teens, young adults (I read it as a teen and loved it, reread it years later and it was so so) Martian Chronicles - interesting concept but eventually it goes into some ecological + anarchist sci-fi which I'm not a fun of I read just the first book in the "Book of the New Sun" and found it quite boring.Īnd my books are quite similar to yours with few exceptions: The other amazing thing about The Book of The New Sun is that each time you read it you realize you missed about 100 things in the previous read-throughs, there is so much "hidden" in plain sight and the subsequent read-throughs are like reading a completely different book.Įdited to include Le Guin as another example of "genre fiction" as literature.
The Book of The New Sun is the first sci-fi series I read where I thought, "this is literature," as in, comparable with books by Dostoyevsky and Hemingway, and I don't believe this is hyperbole, it's just that good. So I love Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion, Martian Chronicles (and other Ray Bradbury books), Ursula K Le Guin(Earthsea), Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle, Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse Five etc), Dune, Game of Thrones series, Neuromancer, Asimov (basically everything but especially Foundation series), Terry Pratchett, and so on.Īnd I consider Gene Wolfe's work to be on a par with all of the above, and I would say he takes sci-fi to another realm. (not trying to sound snobby by the way, I just don't praise books like these lightly or without good reason) For all those who are saying now "Who's Gene Wolfe?" I strongly, strongly, urge you to read his tetralogy "The Book of The New Sun," it's one of the finest sci-fi/fantasy series I've ever read and I have a pretty damn critical taste when it comes to literature.