Stephanie Fachiol’s Reviews > The Sword of the Lictor > Status Update

This might be my favorite fantasy* novel of all time now. Book is done; review to come.

*The Count of Monte Cristo still reigns as "best novel (all categories)"

Severian climbs a mountain and glimpses the cosmos:

“Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll, on our way to a sea from which we shall return only as rain.
I knew then, on the arm of that giant figure, the ambition to conquer time…”

Do you ever do that thing where you read a paragraph three times not because you didn't understand it but because it's beautiful? There are times reading BOTNS that I genuinely have to reread because I have no idea what just happened--but just as often, if not more, I am simply in awe of the voice in which it's written. It's an almost physical sensation of dizzying poetry.