This glowing review of John Crowley's The Solitudes (was Aegypt when first published in 1987) offers a good description of the literature of information, not to mention a librarian's passion:
When Crowley describes the way Pierce "put his pencil between his teeth like a pirate's dirk" as he gets up to find a reference from an old book, it perfectly captures the sense of adventure familiar to anyone who has chased a connection from book to book, through footnotes and card catalogs, with referential mania waiting patiently in the wings...
And this, too:
Crowley cannily makes Pierce's intellectual mission stand for his own: to listen to the whisperings of alternate histories and modes of knowledge, of foundational works officially suppressed but never quite extinguished. Thus such marginalized figures as Dee and Bruno reappear here as counterculture heroes. (Like another title in Bloom's canon, Ishmael Reed's "Mumbo Jumbo," "The Solitudes" is explicitly anti-canonical.)
I'm saving up money and time for Endless Things, the Aegypt sequence's conclusion. I wish I had time to reread the previous three, in order to build up properly. If you haven't read these, commence immediately.
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