Reading Challenge #87: The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

My reading challenge stalled out for a bit as I tried to make my way through #87, The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. This entry was originally published as 4 novels in 1980-83. The kindle versions I found split the collection into 2 parts, so this review will only focus on the first two “books”.

This story follows Severian, a member of the Torturers’ Guild in a far-future Earth. When I first read that description, it turned me off of the story very quickly, but the Torturers’ Guild was more interesting than I gave it credit for.  Yes, they do in fact torture people, as well as acting as jailers and executioners as part of the justice system of their future world. However, they have a professionalism and a moral code that makes their profession seem tolerable enough to me as a reader to at least engage with the story. They have a job to do and they do it, and you don’t get the sense that they are enjoying the suffering of their “clients”.

The first book, The Shadow of the Torturer, shows us Severian as he is finishing his training, entering full membership in the Guild, and eventually being disgraced and cast out from their tower.  His disgrace is due to his strange loyalty to Vodalus, a revolutionary he encounters at the beginning of the story. That loyalty gets him entangled with Thecla, one of the Guild’s clients and the sister of Vodalus’ lover. Rather than let Thecla’s full sentence be carried out, Severian gives her a knife so she can kill herself quickly. Instead of being tortured and killed himself as he expects, Severian is cast out, given a sword and an assignment as executioner in a faraway city.

The rest of the book follows Severian’s journey from the Guild tower to the outskirts of Nessus, highlighting the city’s sprawl, some of the people who live there, and the general state of the world. Under the light of the dying sun we see a world that obviously used to be beautiful and almost magical which has now faded into decay. Places like the botanical gardens give hints about how magnificent things could have been, but most of the city feels more medieval than futuristic. Through this part of the story, other characters move through Severian’s orbit like in a dream, helped along with fantastic images like a duel to the death with meters-high poison flowers. Just when you think he has a fixed set of companions, they are separated in the chaos of the tunnel exiting the city, and the book abruptly ends.

I enjoyed the first book quite a bit, and on its own I would probably rate it 4/5 stars. Unfortunately the second book lost me, and it is the reason why it’s taken longer than usual to make it through this book challenge entry. In some ways the second book had more narrative cohesion than the second half of the first book. Severian has one constant companion, Jonas, for most of this story. He gets to meet Vodalus again at last, and enters his service. And he gets to enter the House Absolute, the seat of power of the ruler of this land. The plot still staggered around strangely like the first book, but large chunks of it lacked the  dreamy quality that made it work so well the first time, and dragged a bit in a few places. After the second abrupt ending I was not compelled to keep reading and decided to call it quits for now instead of buying the second half.

There’s a definite sense of deeper meanings being written into this work, of allegory and rebirth and redemption. A great deal of that is probably lost without seeing how the next two books turn out. Like a book you’ve been assigned in a literature class, I can see the author is trying to impart more layers to this story but my brain steadfastly refuses to comprehend them unless I take the time to step away for a while to give it more thought. Unlike the Elric stories, which I really want to get back to once I finish this challenge, the underlying story here is less coherent, and I think I’m content to abandon this one. I do suspect that it probably does get better again, as all the dangling threads start getting tied up and those deeper meanings become clearer. If you’ve finished it and enjoyed it I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on how book 2 compares to the later ones.

TL;DR: It had some interesting ideas but the plot slowed down and it lost my attention in the second book.

The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

Rating: 3/5 stars

Verdict: Evocative writing and ideas but it couldn’t sustain the story long enough. Still worth checking out but be prepared to set it down if it’s not for you.

Next up: The Codex Alera Series by Jim Butcher


Reading Challenge #87: The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

Hunter Mount Quest

I finished this quest before my break from WoW, but only remembered to post it once I resubscribed. Whoops. My hunter was the last alt that is already 110 that hadn’t gotten her mount. My DK and shaman are 100 and 101, and my warrior is not even close, so they will all have to wait.

Hunter is in a strange place for me. I’ve always liked the class, and the archer archetype is second only to spellcaster in terms of my “player fantasy” preferences. In Legion, however, the class has seen some major changes that detracted from my enjoyment of the class. Beastmastery has always been my favorite spec, and even at 110 with all my gold traits on my weapon it still feels like something is missing. I like having pets but I don’t like feeling like I’m useless in comparison to them, and I also don’t like how much the pet survivability has been nerfed this expansion. Marksman is a nonstarter because the optimal way to play involves getting rid of your pet altogether, and while the new Survival spec is more fun than I thought it would be, I will always prefer ranged to melee.

All that grumbling about the state of the class aside, their mount quest was amazing. Unlike so many of the other class’ quests, there’s no gating, gathering, or extraneous running around. Instead you receive an invitation to Odyn’s great hunt and go straight there. The scenario takes place in the wilderness area of the trial of valor, and it’s just perfect. You get to eat and drink at a valajar feast (doing so gives you some nice buffs), and then you set out into the night to hunt the spirits of some great beasts and put them to rest. You have a few rounds of stalking around in the dark and fighting your prey, and then you get to fight the wolfhawk. The fights weren’t bad at all, even in my barely 110-for-a-week gear. If anything they were slightly too easy, but for this kind of content I’m perfectly okay with that.

The mount looks cool, and fits well with the hunter class theme. About the only thing I didn’t like about this quest is Odyn, because he’s a jerk and on principle I don’t want to do anything to help him. If you have a hunter alt laying around I’d highly suggest going for this class mount. It was a lot of fun!


Hunter Mount Quest

August 2017 Gaming Goals

I’m a few days late with this one since I’ve been AFK for most of this week. I had set a few somewhat ambitious goals for July and did a decent job on them. Let’s see what August brings!

July Goals recap:

FFXIV: Clear both EX primals.  Check! I still haven’t done this with a FC group, but I did at least get my kills.

Advance at least one of my Anima weapons at least one step. Nope. I dialed my play time back and mostly focused on current content.

Level my AST.  Not really. I did get a couple levels, but AST is still not 70. The problem here is that they fixed some of the problems with scholar, so I felt way less motivated to have the 2nd healer job.

Figure out how to buy a house. I do know how to buy a house now so I’ll count this as a win. I haven’t actually bought one because I’m still waiting for people to move out to the new zone so I can find open property in Mists.

Diablo 3: Complete the basic season 11 journey with a necromancer. Done! I haven’t gone much past the first 4 chapters but this is still a win.

Complete the challenge rift every week. Nope. I did attempt it every week, but last week’s build was really difficult and I didn’t manage to clear it under the timer.

Master all the crusader set dungeons. Done! I was an overachiever and got monk and witch doctor too!


August Goals:

FFXIV: Level my AST. I’m so close it really is silly that I still haven’t finished this.

Clear at least 1 boss of Omega Savage. This might be a matter of flinging myself at pugs until I smash through, but I’d love to get this done.

Diablo 3: Finish Barbarian set mastery. I’ve only got one barbarian dungeon left to master in order to get my fancy wings. It might mean giving up on much seasonal progress this time around, but I can do this!

WoW: Get back to the Robo-squids project. There’s an awful lot of dungeons left for our little undergeared, underleveled, undersized group to get through, and now that the new game shine is starting to fade from Stormblood I’m ready to jump back in.


I think these are pretty modest goals for the month, and they’re all things that I really do want to get around to. I can’t wait to post about my pretty new wings!


August 2017 Gaming Goals

Season 11 and Necro Wings

Season 11 started with a very relaxed pace since opening night was a Thursday instead of the usual Friday. By the end of the weekend, though, I had completed through chapter iv and a bit more besides. First things first: the Necromancer is a joy to play. I’m still not sure whether it is because it is genuinely fun or simply because it is the first truly new thing we’ve had in D3 in a long time, but either way I’m loving it. I’ve been using the Rathma set that came as the season journey reward, so I get to have swarms of minions and that’s definitely a play style I enjoy.

I got quite lucky and picked up some important cube items while leveling, and the scythe+shield set combo very early once I hit 70. That meant that over the course of the weekend I went from being carried by a friend to running T10 and carrying others in return. If Tasker & Theo would drop already then I’d have everything complete for the build suggested on Icy Veins. Even without it I’m getting close to GR60. One thing I don’t like about that build is there’s no room for a movement ability. So far I’ve been modifying it a bit so I can put a move ability on my bars because I find myself dying way too much without it. I’m pretty sure that my ability to push into higher GRs is going to be limited with this set because of that, so I’ve been collecting the other ones too. I managed to get the Trag’oul and Inarius sets already, so I can try those out and see if I like them better.

Season 11 and Necro WingsI am extremely happy to report that in addition to my season progress, I also picked up the Necromancer wings on Sunday night. They’re a pretty sweet black/red recolor of the ones that come with the Necromancer pack, and you get them by completing all of the Necromancer class achievements. Luckily I had leveled my non-seasonal necro through the story to test it out when I bought it, so I already had the 2 story-related achieves out of the way going into the season. Most of the achievements were fairly easy to get through normal play, although things like letting your skeletons kill 500 elites took a bit of time. There were a few boss-specific ones that required some more forethought, but they weren’t too difficult. The trickiest one was having to kill your shadow clone using simulacrum during the Diablo encounter. I found some good advice that suggested lowering the difficulty way down, removing any gear that has thorns or any legendary gems that have damaging effects, and using simulacrum + blood nova. It took a couple tries to get the simulacrum to have the killing blow but compared to the silly things I’ve done for set dungeon masteries it was a cake walk.

Speaking of set mastery, I did master the Rathma’s set dungeon. I’ll probably do a write-up of all the Necro dungeons so I won’t go into tons of specifics here, but I will say that it wasn’t too bad. Getting one objective for completion for the season journey should be no problem for most folks. Now that I have my necro wings I’m eager to get back to my barbarian and finish mastering the last couple dungeons I need for the REALLY fancy wings. I got randomly grouped with someone who had them while running rifts the other night, and now I’m even more motivated to get them.


Season 11 and Necro Wings