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Tons of powerful ideas. I did find it to be .... not super accessible. I would love to read a longer book that explains this one to readers who aren't already steeped in the specific theories that this one is responding to.

We get to hear a range of Wilde's voices. There is a conversation that feels like a cross between a Socratic dialogue and The Importance of Being Earnest. There is a much more traditional essay about the use of costume in Shakespearean theatre. Wilde expresses many fascinating ideas about art and criticism of art. And the Socratic piece in particular also makes is clear that he's not dogmatically claiming he's "right" about his arguments. A good essay isn't a final answer, its scaffolding for interesting conversation.

A great and complicated read. It critiques the Cartesian and Empirical philosophical traditions and proposes an alternative way to understand how humans perceive our world. The writing style is artful, full of poetic metaphor, which I found surprising in a philosophy text. And the style is humble in a fascinating way - MP frequently will identity a problem, propose one solution, decide there's a new problem, and keep iterating through problems and solutions until the end of a chapter that finally reaches something like a conclusion (and even those are contingent and later chapters will point out that reality's actually still more complicated than what he's been able to propose so far)

Its a book that gives a very personal lens into an historically important time. In retrospect, I think I would have appreciated the book better if I'd known something about what was happening in Madagascar in the 18th century.

This is the same way that Greek or Shakespearean tragedies and comedies assume the audience knows how the story ends, and much of the richness of the story depends on the fact the audience knows what's coming.

The writing felt oddly mechanical. The book has a ... gimmick ... that the "real" story was a beautiful epic poem and the narrator is just recounting it. The narrator keeps making excuses for how much worse their own prose is, compared to the "real thing". The excuses wear kind of thin, since this is actually the real text. I was very excited to read this, but ended up disappointed.