Books like Exodus From the Long Sun

I've now read two separate, four-part series by Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun, and The Book of the Long Sun (of which this novel is the last part). And while I should have faced the truth earlier, I think I really dislike his writing style.His universes are not bad. There's something I like about the quasi-medieval future societies with traces of high technology. They suggest the future will be far from Utopian, and we'll always stray from Enlightenment ideals in the way we govern ourselves, but there's something reassuringly realistic about that assertion and I like the way he guides the reader through what looks like a backwards society only the reveal that -- wow! -- the world is on the inside of a cylinder, and some of the nuns are robots. That, and his prose is structurally excellent, almost a joy to read ... almost ... but unfortunately the clarity of his storytelling is just not there. And it ruins the books.For one thing, Wolfe is obsessed with dialogue. I can think of writers who avoid dialogue to a fault, focus way too much on description and action, but in Wolfe's books (especially this one) dialogue is almost the driver of the story. Wolfe will sloppily throw a very ambiguous action sequence at his reader, a passage that should be clearly written due to its great importance (a character might be getting killed!), but at the end I have no idea what happened. As a reader, I leaf back a page and read it all a second time, to little avail. Then, ten pages later, I learn what happened because two characters decide to mention it during a five-page dialogue.It's dizzying, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, because while these characters are chatting away endlessly the reader is left in exile, outside the moment. Wolfe provides fully-realized, often admirable characterization in his dialogue, with each speaker showing his or her own recognizable quirks. Yet I ask myself as I read: Where are these people while they're talking? What are they doing? I don't know, because Wolfe hasn't specified. Maybe they're in a bar, or a house of worship, or a mansion, or a tunnel. Or amid smoke in a terrible battle, with bombs falling around them. Wolfe doesn't seem to care.And I need to get this off my chest. The following are the names of some select characters in this book: Silk, Sand, Shale, Saba, Siyuf, Sard, Schist, Sciathan, Shell, Shrike, Scleroderma, Skate, Slake, Spider. Really, I'm not making that list up. There are also some gods, of which two are Scylla and Sphigx. You might be wondering if Wolfe can generate any characters with names that don't start with S, and yes, fortunately he can, but the plentitude of these S-characters is hyper-Dostoyevskian. I wonder if he actually hates his readers.