Admittedly, I'm not totally sold yet, but I'd like to give this some time. The concept -- form-breaking post-modern novel sequence as multi-season television series, a kind of conceptual post-Lost international interlacing of characters and interrogation of reality, certainly lacks precedent, and is highly ambitious, but the actual content doesn't quite excite me. With its central L.A. polyphony, this reads more like a reduction of Vanessa Place's La Medusa, than anything really form-pushing. But, then how could it accomplish anything truly impressive in itself, when these 800 pages are just the first volume of a planned twenty-six. Like television, there's a certain amount of structural padding, but like a television series, how much can we really judge from the first episode alone? Really this will all be about the development of these characters and threads over multiple volumes, and all this so far is little more than setup. Arguably even in this volume everything happens, across the globe, but none of it really feels like more than introductory motions. And there's also an element of a game to this --- with its multiple languages and web of references I suspect that this was intended, from the first, to be a code to be cracked via coordinated action across the internet. Having read this mostly on a long flight, I've not yet probed the conversation around it very deeply, so it seems, for the moment to be an extraneous playing with the reader. But I hope it may engage in deeper ways as well. Since I obviously have to keep going with this to see how it develops, I'm quite grateful to find that the Brooklyn Library seems to be stocking them all. So far.