Paul’s Reviews > The Great Fire of London: A Story with Interpolations and Bifurcations > Status Update

This is a slog and I may DNF. Or skip this infamous part 6. Too technical. Feels like a textbook

Part 5 is just absolutely brutal. I don’t see the appeal with this book at all. I’ve promised myself that I will read 1 section per day until this thing is rid from my life. A section is usually a page or 2. It’s all I can seem to handle. Zero enthusiasm to finish this but holding out hope that Part 6 will be better.

My daughter is now about 5 weeks old. I have never been so sleep deprived, nervous system completely fried, hearing phantom cries, meaning she’s gone down for a nap against her will, as always, and I can hear a distant scream of hunger only to realize it’s a hallucination. It’s a lot of work, but there is downtime, so I try to read. This is the absolute worst book to try to complete under these circumstances.

So difficult and dense to an extent that reading is becoming frustrating. This man is clearly a genius but this Ouilipo madness is not very friendly. Perhaps I’m not a talented enough reader. Definitely an impressive underrating but this reader is lost and it’s feeling like a slog. Too many digressions, too little story.