A Canticle for Leibowitz

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a book I've been vaguely familiar with for quite a while now, but knew almost next to nothing about it until just the past few months when I found a copy at a used bookstore and decided to buy it on a whim.

In short, the premise is absolutely fantastic-- the idea that within the post-apocalyptic wasteland Miller constructs, the most important thing worth preserving is knowledge itself, particularly the sciences and arts... and by splitting the book into three separate sections that take place hundreds of years apart, you get a vivid picture of how this preserved knowledge not only becomes integrated into the public conscience and informs the cycle of rebirth and destruction of society, but also becomes obscured and/or exaggerated. Those moments were my favorite parts of the story; snippets of information and characters from one section becoming part of a mythos in the next-- the process of how we shape our own folklore in an age totally removed from antiquity.

There are some swathes of the book that are a bit dry and tedious, but the concept is so phenomenal and Miller's straight-forward writing style makes a complicated premise easily readable.