I may be a bit biased, but here goes: This is one of my favorite books of the year.

It starts out slow. The preface, by Stuart Moulthrop, was a bit overwrought, and you’d be okay skipping it. The slow start, the boredom, you suspect, may be intentional. But it almost lost me, who is an admittedly patient reader, especially for Michael, willing to give him a lot of rope with which to hang himself and neighboring parties. About 40 pages in I was on the cusp of leaving it for another read, but soldiered through, and it was at about that mark where the story took off. Unraveled, to a degree, and picked up the pace. The awkward entrance into the hot tub was complete: the tentative sensitive portions of your body had been burned sufficiently with little enough lasting damage that it now felt comfortable, right. Or perhaps, more in line with a theme from the book, you, the reader, had learned the controls of this new video game, and now were fully immersed in the experience.

If you’ve read any Joyce before it covers common themes from his other works. I still think I rank The War Outside of Ireland as one of my favorite books of all time, but the more time I’ve spent thinking about how this book unraveled and came together in the end I find myself appreciating it more and more. It feels very hyper textual, and I can imagine Michael writing the bulk of the work, with all its intertwining strands, in Storyspace, which is where his more famous hyperfictions have been created, of course.

And, like his other works, this one is beautiful, elegiac, and lyrical. In addition to disappearance there is the other side of the coin; loss, that figures heavily. It may not be for everybody, but if you can slog through the opening scene setting and give yourself over, you’ll find a brilliant read.