A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Blasphemous old cactus.”

I am neither religious enough nor science-y enough to get the most out of this book. I feel like the author was trying to be too coy at burying a message about mankind being doomed to repeat the past and morality and other dense topics, but forgot to include a cohesive story to tie it all together.

The book takes place in post-WWIII America, after a period of time when books, learning, and science was rejected. Monks in monasteries gather what's left of knowledge, painstakingly record it by hand in books, and quietly file it away in libraries to be recovered later. If this sounds familiar, it's because the author was trying to get you to see early on that history repeats itself. You'll see this theme again and again and again. The book follows one of these monasteries through the years, the Order of St. Leibowitz. Important, key knowledge is recovered (I guess, science-y terms are used liberally throughout this book), and we track what changes are wrought by this discovery. Technology slowly comes back, and we keep our eye on this monastery and how it changes (or doesn't) with the times.

The author makes liberal use of time jumps throughout the story, making it hard to remember who was who when looking back through the years, and also giving the story a layer of complexity it didn't really need. I was lost for large parts of the middle book, where the author takes a long period of time to not explain science-y things and also establish some conflict within post-apocalypse America. There's lots of references in here that went over my head, presumably because I'm not quite as up on my religious doctrine as maybe others might be.

It's kind of a convoluted mess I didn't really enjoy. The beginning had promise, but then we time jumped and I lost what interest it had built up. By the time we got to it, the ending was fairly predictable. Lots of people like this book, but I guess I just wasn't one of them.