A Canticle for Leibowitz

[Grant, Usurper of Book Club]

This is a really good book. I couldn't help but thinking of the Fallout video game series, for which there were commercials running on the television. So that might have increased my feelings of goodwill towards the book, but the breadth of the world and imagination to have three narratives spanning vast numbers of years. I was surprised when Brother Francis died, but I liked the way the book just moved on, with the description of the desert and the future.

I feel like I might have been missing some stuff with the Latin, and I'm not totally sure what the deal with "the wanderer" was, specifically why he was supernatural and lived for thousands of years.

As I finished the book I was kind of thinking about how it was a really great book, but the two main themes of the book were "cold war" and "religion" and I thought that the themes were kind of dated. But then in the airport as I was finishing the book news came up about the whole Paris thing. I don't really want to talk too much of a tragedy for the purposes of the book club, but the whole secular vs. religious world conflict as well as the idea that people do terrible things to each other are not themes that are going away.

Which presents a pretty cynical view of humanity, and I like to think of myself as an optimist as well, so maybe that's why I do feel tempted to dismiss the themes as well.

The conflict between the religious and the secular was approached quite interestingly, with the church being a repository of knowledge and salvation at the start, but, at the end of the novel they are the ones causing some of the hardship by not permitting the doctors to perform their work. Though it is the more secular world of government which has brought on the new apocalypse.

Was a very well written book, would definitely recommend.