I was instructed as an 11- or 12-year old to read aCfL. I thought it was clever the way the Middle Ages intersected with post nuclear war Earth as the setting. Questions about what is important, venerated, and why. What 'knowing' means. As to the bleak outlook, I don't remember enough (it was a long time ago), but a few years ago looked it up on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz?usesk... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_M._Miller_Jr.?useskin=v... I learned that Arthur Miller Jr suffered from depression and chose to end his life with a firearm in 1996,…
A Canticle for Leibowitz is a novel where, after a nuclear war, a Catholic monastery transcribing technical texts (they do not understand) over many generations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz Anathem is a Neal Stephenson novel about (again) monastic communities preserving knowledge over hundreds or thousands of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem
"A Canticle For Leibowitz"; "The Stranger"; "The Fall"; "Childhood's End"; "Riddley Walker"; "The Martian Chronicles"; "The Sea of Tranquillity"; "Animal Farm"; "Catch 22"; "The Catcher in the Rye"; "A Clockwork Orange"; "Dr. Strangelove"; "To Kill A Mockingbird"; "The Little Prince"; "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"; "Lord of the Flies"; "Charlotte's Web"; "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn"; "All Quiet on the Western Front"; "The World According to Garp"; "Invisible Man"; "Flowers for Algernon"; "Sophie's Choice"; "The Road"; "All the Light We Cannot See"; "The Goldfinch"; "Atonement"; "The…
Reading has become a strongly gendered lifestyle and supposed status marker. Most of the books are indeed paltry entertainment - soapy and saccharine romances, formulaically transgressive erotica, fantasies about unlimited witchy powers, and perfect book boyfriends - but it's still a huge market. Men moved to video games and chan culture. Which are a different kind of paltry entertainment. It's curious how there was a shift from male dominated niches, like Lovecraftian fantasy and heroic fantasy, through the imperial sci-fi peak in the 50s to 70s, through the Hollywood-influenced 80s, then…
Funny, I had the opposite reaction when reading A Canticle for Leibowitz. There's one scene near the end where a refugee mother and baby are dying. They are crippled, burned, and suffering radiation poisoning. Both are in great pain, and the mother wants euthanasia for herself and her baby. A priest first tries (and almost succeeds) to talk her out of it. He then resorts to force, trying to kidnap the baby and eventually punching a doctor. When stymied by police, he is let off with a warning instead of being jailed. I'm pretty sure that scene was supposed to make the reader feel sympathetic…
I write this as someone who loves that book: that sentence is exactly the sort the editor/judge of the contest would probably classify as being kinda bad, yes, but also too likely to actually hook a reader to be a worthy entrant. "Brother Gerard of Utah", "might never have discovered", "blessed" paired with the humorously cold and vague "documents", "girded loins" (just inherently funny, not exactly bad), "that" being just far enough removed from its referent that it reads awkwardly. This all happens in part because (I'm pretty sure) it is supposed to read as kinda funny, because it's…
TL;DR: Bradbury, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Vonnegut, sort of. Bradbury, unreservedly. I remember really liking Dune through God Emperor, but I read it so long ago that I recommend it only tentatively. I do recall that the one non-Dune book of Herbert's I attempted to read seemed like it was written while on acid, and not in a good way. A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of the best sci-fi novels I've read. Its author wasn't very active, though, so there's not much else from him. I haven't read any of the rest, but none of it has the reputation that Canticle does. I'd put forward…
A Canticle for Leibowitz > In the depths of the Utah desert, long after the Flame Deluge has scoured the earth clean, a monk of the Order of Saint Leibowitz has made a miraculous discovery: holy relics from the life of the great saint himself, including the blessed blueprint, the sacred shopping list, and the hallowed shrine of the Fallout Shelter. In a terrifying age of darkness and decay, these artifacts could be the keys to mankind's salvation. But as the mystery at the core of this groundbreaking novel unfolds, it is the search itself—for meaning, for truth, for love—that offers hope for…
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller is my favorite sci-fi short story I’ve read in a long time. It follows an order of Catholic monks in the American southwest many years after a nuclear holocaust. I won’t say more than that. It was originally just 1 story, Fiat Homo, and then was expanded into a novel. Fiat Homo is freely available in audio form from the BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03w355l/episodes/guide
AI tutors might help with this because I think the constraints teachers have make it difficult to foster a love of books in a lot of kids. When I was growing up, teachers would assign one text for the entire class to read. Sometimes it was a book I enjoyed (like Canticle for Leibowitz) but more often than not it was some book I hated (like Great Gatsby which I reread as an adult and still think it’s terrible). If you really wanted to instill a love of reading and develop skills around reading, you would give students more choice. My kids had a similar experience so I don’t think much…