@starkatt Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. I do recommend it to people all the damn time, but it's written in a very stylized style that most people just can not deal with. I don't think anybody I've tried to get to read it has made it all the way through the first book, let alone the series.
@vahnj @starkatt oh my gosh yay! :D all of 'em are in reprint these days, so they're not as impossible to find as they used to be. plus also get "Urth of the New Sun" which is the sequel to the quadrilogy, and is also heckin' good (and explains a lot about what the heck was going on in the first books!). my next investment is going to be Lexicon Urthus, because I've re-read all of them enough that I'm now frantically curious to look up the individual words, y'know? XD