Well, I definitely liked it better than the Cold War spy one, though it was a remarkably similar reading experience: slightly disorienting, with a lot of Big Reveals for which I didn’t fully understand what’s happening. But I can see why people would re-read this one and gradually build up a great attachment to its subtleties: when I *did* know what was going on, I felt very clever. But especially early on, I think I knew exactly the wrong amount of historical background: enough to recognize things but not enough to be confident that they had been creatively altered to suit the novel’s premise; rather than cottoning on that it was “alternative history”, I thought we were doing flashbacks to Rome…. Overall I don’t intend to put in the work needed to fall in love with this book, since I already have my personal library of touchstones, and I have the uncomfortable feeling that at least some of the epiphanies I miss are due to misaligned value systems (such that I can’t “read in” the “right” emotions/motivations). But I’ll probably read a lot of things *about* this book and I’m glad I gave Ford a try.