I remember being entranced by this book when I was (much) younger. Apparently sometime in the last few decades I got less patient. At 600 plus pages, or in my case 27 plus hours of audiobook narration, it really is an endurance event. I can only hope the movie is not produced by Peter Jackson. There are some amusing bits, but there also seemed to me to be many wild loops of narrative that didn't really go anywhere. Similary some of the characters have the potential to be interesting, but perhaps because their number, they didn't really engage me.