It took me over two weeks to read the first half of this and then I blew through the second half in two evenings. The writing is excellent, as everyone has noted, though I found myself a bit frustrated early on with some of the parsing of hierarchies of the arts (ie, comics vs graphic novels). Anyway, this is an extremely inventive and different sort of novel that I'm glad I read, despite some of my hesitations in the first half. 
 Also, having just gotten over the H3N2 flu, the flu virus in this novel scared the crap out of me.