Soldier of Arete, Gene Wolfe
The second book in the series, as good as the first though things become a little confusing in the end. Intentionally so, I mean when the narrator can't remember anything for more then 24 hours not everything he says is going to be coherent and since you get only his perspective things become all turned around. These books are definitely the most transportive kind of fantasy. I'm just done now and I have work to do and household chores, but I'd much rather spend my day pretending I'm traipsing through ancient Greece with heroes and gods. Alas the laundry calls and I must hearken its cry. So I will strap on my sword and bronze armour and get to it. Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete are now bound and sold together as Latro in the Mist. Go get them. You won't be sorry.
AJAX BELL 
January 11, 2007 at 4:20 pm
These look awesome. Thanks for the rec and reviews.
January 19, 2007 at 12:28 pm
Tag!
February 3, 2007 at 10:30 pm
I'm looking to get into these once I finish his Book of the Short Sun trilogy. I've sort of been reading Wolfe on and off over the past few years, just before dropping in I was reading an article about him at the Washington Post –
The first challenge: Wolfe makes demands of the reader that are at some points exorbitant. He has the instincts of a mystery writer: He erects mazes of practical and symbolic clues, including plentiful red herrings, that require acute detective faculties to decode, and he rarely explains himself at the end. His finest works are his short stories, where a sparseness of explanation is inevitable, and his multivolume novels, where the clues accumulate prodigiously; paths through the maze may sometimes seem lacking or may suspiciously proliferate, leading to a pronounced lack of interpretative closure — Wolfe's admirers are notoriously at odds as to what his texts mean. By the same token, reading Wolfe is one of the greatest intellectual pleasures contemporary fiction affords.
High praise.