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Comment by cflewis | Hacker News Reader

The reason why I enjoy Tolkein so much is that I like the poetic, almost biblical prose. I know why it drives some people mad, but I really liked it.

I've never found anything that comes close to replicating it. I would love recommendations if people have them.

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Tolkien's prose isn't biblical so much as it's imitation-Nordic, maybe. If you want biblical, read Blood Meridian. It's in fact so biblical that scholars use it as a reference when they translate the original text into contemporary English. It's also biblical in a much deeper sense, but that's a different point.

You might like Gene Wolfe, especially The Book of the New Sun and the Latro series [1].

The Book of the New Sun is technically sci-fi, but in fantasy trappings, set in a future world in which the sun is slowly dying out, and humankind has mostly lost their knowledge of technology. It's dense, filled with sly little narrative puzzles that are left for readers to deconstruct, and it's beautifully written in a mannered, intentionally archaic style.

The Latro series, starting with Soldier of the Mist, is a historical fantasy about a Roman soldier who suffers from retrograde amnesia, so he must continuously write down what happened the day before. (It came out decades before the movie Memento.)

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/sci-fis-difficul...

I second this endorsement of BOTNS. It is the best fiction book I've ever read. I think lobster_johnson's description here is a great meta-summary. For the sake of brevity I will curb my impulse to vomit up heaps of sycophantic praise for this book. I highly recommend it if you're up for an intellectually demanding read.

I remember trying the Kindle sample and thinking "Man, this is rough going". Does it ever ease up?

I had to start The New Sun three times before it got fully under my skin. It might take a couple of chapters.

Not really, but it has enough memorable scenes and ideas that you will want to read it again in a few years, and you will then get a lot more out of it, assuming you are anything like myself.

There are levels and levels to what's going on in the writing. The early chapters are there to set up that he's lying to you, in a way that's heavy handed and devilishly subtle at the same time. Reading Gene Wolfe is like playing a poker game with the author, and no matter how hard you try to pay attention sometimes you look down and chips are missing, like Penn and Teller were just "explaining" a magic trick to you. It's frustrating and difficult and fantastic all at the same time, but obviously not for the same market as someone expecting a typical coming of age fantasy novel.

I know this is leaning into off-topic territory so I promise not to do the fiction-debate-thread thing, but a lot of readers (myself included) disagree with the suggestion that he ever lies to the reader. :)

I'll be honest, it doesn't get any less rough, but eventually you learn to accept that you can't understand everything that the narrator has to tell you the first time you read it. Only after reading the whole story was I able to unwind the complex layers of context that underpin the protagonist's narrative from the very first page. It is worth the effort IMHO.

There's something about Gene Wolfe's writing that just blows me away. Like sometimes, I think I want to try writing my own novel someday. But when I'm reading Gene Wolfe, I'm just embarrassed at the hubris. It's even more humbling when you learn he did most of it while holding down a full-time day job.

While reading BOTNS I had a synaesthesic experience where reading the words felt like I was eating meat, rich roast cooked til it was falling off the bone. I read somewhere that Wolfe, rather than coining new words, searched the Oxford English Dictionary for obscure and forgotten words and used those instead.

Can you help describe it? I'm currently reading the hobbit, but i'm reading it in German to learn the language, and I'm constantly thinking that there's subtle things I'm missing out on as a non-native speaker. If you give a brief explanation it would help me look for it as I read.

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