I began it because I bought it as a present for someone who had it on her Amazon wish list, but it didn't arrive until after Christmas. I kept reading it because he is one of the few articulate prominent literary theorists. He draws interesting parallels and contrasts between music and literature, the antagonism between democracy and the literary canon, and other ideas. His argument that the best literary criticism is other literature is interesting, and sympathetic to my own belief that one earns the right to speak on literary theory only by writing literature. I don't agree with the book's thesis, at all, but the big spaces between the points of his argument are good. Just not at carrying the thesis of the book.

The interestingness drops around page 90, though. I can still tell what he means to say, but I keep stopping, scratching my head, and saying, "Did he really mean to say that? Is this a first draft?"