May 15: The prose was gorgeous, and this is a book that really makes you think if you want to properly enjoy it, which I appreciate. You can take it at face value, or you can dig a layer or two or four deeper.

That said I do think it puts a lot of work on the reader to make its points. Is that a flaw? I don't necessarily think so, but for me personally it's not a pro either. I appreciate not being spoonfed things as a reader, but could have done with just a bit more in this case. But perhaps that's another compliment, I enjoyed it and my only possible criticism is that it could have been more.

I think this is one I'll need to read again in the next few years to go into with a new headspace. Seriously though, the prose I just enjoyed so, so much.

May 17 edit: There are very few books, not none but few, that I've finished and simply gone back to the beginning and begun anew. This is one. I couldn't stop thinking of it, and I couldn't stop thinking about how my first read, I spent a lot of time trying to orient myself as to what was being communicated. Not that I want to be told what to think, but that I want to understand what the author thinks or hopes the reader thinks. To me it comes down to one of the last lines of the book – about treating people carelessly, destroying them, and retreating back to money. With that line in my possession, I felt sure a second read would feel entirely different, and so it did.