Took me 3 renewals to finally get through this book. It's definitely interesting, but I had a hard time sustaining interest -- yet I felt obligated to mush onward since there was just enough moments of discovery to make it worth it. The best part of this book are Henderson's abundance of allusions. I started a Spotify playlist from all the classical songs he references, for example.

Yet the allusions are also coupled with what ultimately becomes a really distracting feature - the sidebar quotations on each page. Rather than relegate all the references to a footnote or endnote, Henderson's publisher elected to format down the width of the text and gift a full third of the side of each page to the notes. I found this formatting made the text really hard to read and much more difficult to access than it should have been. If I wanted all of the text squeezed into a tight space, I would be reading more on an e-reader.

I would recommend this as a nightstand or toilet-side book -- fun to dip into for short bouts, but hardly a page turned on its own.