I really like this quiet book by Walter J Miller. A Canticle For Leibowitz which was first published in 1959 has almost no sword-fights but there is a great deal of satire, and poetry in this dry masterwork of future apocalyptic fiction. At just over 300 pages it can also be read in a sitting or two though it packs a pretty good punch in terms of subject matter.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is centered around a cloister of religious monks living in the western deserts of the North American Continent in what is now Utah. The world of the book is stagnant after a nuclear holocaust wiped out most of the people on the planet and left much of the world uninhabitable. There is no main character or even main viewpoint across the books three main but separate parts except the story of the monks of the order of St. Leibowitz and the gradually recovering earth. This uncommon setting is indeed what gives the novel much of its wild and windswept flavor and as you read you may slowly find yourself becoming interested in the mundane mindsets and petty religious quarrels of the sequestered monks.
That being said If you’ve been waiting to try something different this might would be a book you’d like. Miller’s style is thought provoking without being watered down and when he marches past death and especially meaningless and painful death without flinching and sets it besides the humor and boredom of the overly dangerous, haunted, radioactive, spiritually and mortally terrifying yet still mundane world of the characters of Canticle, you really feel an appreciation for the variety and vibrancy of man’s destiny which is nonetheless still meaningless depending on how you look at it.
Some good religious and personal musings in this one.
Hard to Classify but let’s say: Future Possibilities, Sense of Wunda