
It is both poetic and fascinating. It's not an easy read but I recommend it.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28930020-the-rose-of-par...
Sometimes as you say, "cynically written" books like 1984 can be have that bite, and thats true, but some books that have "Bite" because makes me go "Whoa!" or a slight panic when my world-view gets changed.
Godel, escher, bach was one of the first books that did that for me. It struck me on the head and i could not put the book down. Concepts of infinity and strange loops dominated my underlying intellectual uneasyness for some time afterwards.
Blood Meridian was also a book that shook my understanding of pre-1800 life. How close to savagery humanity still was only 200 years ago fundamentally shook my understanding of where i stand in relation to my ancestors.
"The Quants" showed me how shaky our financial infrastructure really is.
The Rose Of Paracelsus: On Secrets & Sacraments blew my mind. Spending 20 years to create a masterpeice that would certainly fall into both of your categories at once... a brilliant, cynical book, hopeless and callous in the eyes of a population with the attention span of a tik tok.
