A Canticle for Leibowitz
Three centuries of post-nuclear civilization, with monks of the Order of Leibowitz preserving fragments of a destroyed world. Miller's meditation on cyclical catastrophe and institutional memory is the most Catholic and most bleak of all SF novels.
There is no central thread: characters and plotlines introduced in one section are dropped when it ends, which readers find fragmenting rather than elegant. The long stretches of untranslated Latin are a real barrier, “a little hard to digest” and a drag on momentum. Some find it “somewhat emotionally stunted,” characters functioning as mouthpieces rather than people, and there are almost no women. The second section’s political manoeuvring is where readers say it goes tedious, one reducing that stretch to “Yawn. Skim. Skip.” And some push back on the Catholic framing, particularly the ethical stance the third section takes; for one reader it was “the most disappointing book I read in 2015.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
