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i couldn’t put this down and the prose is very fine. but be warned it is in first person with an unreliable narrator. he omits things, and perhaps even lies by omission. so read this as if you are playing a game with someone you care about and find fascinating — but can’t trust to be completely forthcoming.

holmes pastiches are something you have to like, so ... i liked em but ymmv.

the trick ending really didn’t work for me. brace yourself for it.

the narrative bits are as fine as anything. his theorizing about addiction is more or less claptrap. on the whole it would be more fun to see someone else depict de quincy.

returning to this as an old man, in some ways i’m surprised how good this is. the hst character, dr gonzo, is a gentleman loser, straight out of a steely dan song. thompson’s prose is truly wonderful. on the other hand, it is often puerile and stupid, and the 60s white journo hipster-style racist and sexist jokes don’t age well at all.

i love this book, but i’m an english teacher. enlightening challenging wrenching, it was great reading on a literal route 66 car trip. at all costs, avoid reading this against a time deadline for a paper.

The tale of a swashbuckling deep space ... board game?

Gurgeh is a master game player from The Culture who finds himself in a game tournament in an alien empire. But what is really going on? ... Faster paced and a bit shorter than the first novel, there are plenty of classic pulp tropes, the occasion gross-out, and a few Big Ideas here and there. Loads of fun.

a ripping yarn that involves galaxy-scale world building, political and religious passions and boyish joys such as space pirates, a vast abandoned train system, and a card game of disgusting cruelty. is it great art? ehh. but it’s great pulp in an amusing Brit-scifi vein that i couldn’t put down.

I am not sure why I chose to read this at this phase of life, but the intuition was correct. It strikes me now as being somewhat in the vein of Joyce's The Dead. Fiction that speaks to me now, I think, is that which is a hard fought struggle to recover, and perhaps redeem, something, as this assuredly is. Not exactly a roman a clef, but much about Woolf's family is in it. Mrs Ramsey is Woolf's mother. It is a glorious and strange novel in which almost nothing happens.