Joel and I just put up our newest Big Read Cast, on Gene Wolfe’s sublime novel The Wizard Knight. You can listen to the episode here, if you’d like!1
The Wizard Knight is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and reading it immediately caused me to claim Gene Wolfe as one of my favorite authors, even though I haven’t read any of his other work.2 Yet, despite the fact that I love it, and the fact that I spent two hours talking about it with my friend Joel, I’ve been struggling to articulate why I like the book so much when I talk about it with friends. I end up either quoting passages from the book in the hope that demonstrates its quality, or just saying “I don’t know, man, trust me, it’s incredible.” When it comes to the books that are particularly meaningful to me, this is not a new problem.
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