[observation]

One book more than any other: The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.

Why?

Darwin opens up the door of Deep Time when he explained his discovery. An appreciation of the immensity of time happens to be linked to explanations of how and why things are. Wolfe also deals with Deep Time but in the context of society.

What Gene Wolfe does is he creates books where you need to read between the lines, you need to create hypotheses to understand what's going on. I won't describe it further because it may lose some of the import, it's probably the most important fiction book written in the 20th century.

What I'd like is a photograph of Peter Thiel's library, I'm fascinated by the range of ideas, the meta-ideas he explores. Maybe @sama can smuggle in a camera or we could hijack a roomba.

[chris_st]

This is an amazing set of books (it's four volumes). Possibly, what I appreciate about it most is that he doesn't describe anything, like so many other SF authors do. You just have to figure it out ("read between the lines" is a good way to describe it).

The other astounding thing is how incredibly bad all the rest of Wolfe's work is. Really, it's night and day.

[observation]

Maybe he got too close to an Alzabo.

Suspect the format puts some people off, I understand it's publisher economics but having 4 volumes paired into 2 books strikes people as complicated as they try to work out how much book they're getting or not getting.

[stinkytaco]

You would probably enjoy Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It's also about deep time.