Mike: I don't think the passage of time is the problem here - I've read things he said about it in the '80s and he had pretty much the same opinion, that the nuts & bauls of the book more or less just mysteriously appeared. One thing he didn't touch on this time, but has talked about elsewhere, is that the painting of…

Derek: Yeah, rizlas are just papers. Rizla is the world's most popular brand. Ironically, they're French.

Weenus: If it had been such a hard slog for me the first time, I would've had the same reaction as you; there's plenty of stuff I admire but can't enjoy. For whatever reason, I just didn't find it that hard to read, even when a lot of the references went over my head. My wild guess is that it works a lot better if…

Good grief, Ficta, that's great. I've read the book a bazillion times and I knew about the Ussher chronology but never made the connection (so to speak). As Jason says, there's reason to believe that the Ram's count is off anyway, but I can't imagine that this is a coincidence… Hoban clearly liked overloading the…

Totally agree about the effectiveness of what's left out. The early draft chapter (from before he basically threw it all out and started over) that's in the appendix of the "expanded edition" really drives that home— it's more "filled in" as well as more conventionally written, and it's kind of interesting, but kind…

Yeah, and reading it out loud doesn't just help with the spelling, it also makes it funnier - there are a lot of deadpan jokes that work better once you get into the conversational tone. Like "What a way to live."