I've got about a hundred pages left, I came pretty close to bailing around the "Eschaton" chapter around page 200 but now it's become one of my favorite books of all time. My entire idea of addiction has flipped on its head since starting this book. The reason I almost quit was because I was frustrated with the disjointed narrative. My interest was peaked in chapters like the first Ken Erdedy and the Hal lung room chapter, but instead of linear progression from those stories the author takes up pages upon pages with the voice of a random street rat, some weird dialogue-only scenes with a legless assassin and fake woman, and then some insane contrived description of the most complicated game in the world, Eschaton. But Eschaton was the hardest part of the whole novel, most of it was a page turner for me. Some of the most vivid characters you will ever read about. The thing that took the most getting used to is how the plot is told offhandedly. None of it is directly described, it is told in throwaway comments from various characters. The important events are pointed to rather than explicitly stated. Once you understand this, you will enjoy the book more. There are parts of the book that I almost couldn't get through not because of difficulty level, but because it was so emotionally raw and I felt like there were mirrors being held up to aspects of my personality that I wasn't comfortable looking at. In short, it is nothing like anything else I've ever read and made me realize just how powerful language can be.