3.5 stars, rounding up to 4. Epic fantasy can be a hard sell for me, but that's leavened here by the fact that the characters are constantly moving between this world and a secondary one, and that gives the story a grounding that I can appreciate. Plus, you know, it's all about books and there's never been a book about books that I didn't like. Particularly relevant here is the ongoing argument of the usefulness of libraries, and of their role in preserving data. (I was particularly struck by the lines comparing the frequency with with libraries are expected to cull stock compared with all the far-more-useless-than-books-things stacked up in warehouses for eternity. As a culture, our priorities are fucked.)

Honestly, I was a bit surprised at how much I enjoyed this. That's nothing again Knox! But The Absolute Book, also features fairies and angels and godhead, and these are also often not my favourite parts of fantasy. If I'm perfectly honest, I do think at times the book gets a little cluttered and the epilogue hasn't been set up sufficiently, but I really did enjoy the real-world parts of this book, and the secondary setting was beautifully described. It's a fascinatingly ambitious text, anyway, and it's absolutely stuffed with little historical details about destroyed libraries that make me want to go look up some of the sources Knox lists in her acknowledgements section.