annoyingly, this book is still in the category of "almost everything i could possibly say about it has at least essay-length", and i don't have the time or motivation to write essays 🙈

a fun side observation tho: it moves slowly, not in the sense that i'm on page 155 and it's barely evening of the second day described, but in that reappearing characters usually reappear exactly where they were left before the narration switched focus on someplace else, and there are absolutely no "they did $things in the meantime"-passages anywhere — everything is part of the main trunk of the narration grinding along at dizzying (but slow) speeds, without ever taking a moment for breath (while Mycroft repeatedly hits you on the head with the entire canon of 'western' philosophy, and being unnecessarily horny about it all)