Good Reading

I just finished (for a second time) this book by Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz. It is a sometimes amusing, often frightening, very moving science fiction type novel - which is a genre I usually don't enjoy very much. It is also an apocalypse, so perhaps it's not very good holiday reading! But I found it very, very good. The author was a somewhat reclusive fellow who gave up writing after a brief but brilliant career. He committed suicide a few years ago, which is ironic in light of the fact that the third section of Leibowitz is a beautiful argument against euthanasia.