I've already read books 10, 11 and 12 (in that order) of A Dance to the Music of Time and I've just finished book 9, The Military Philosophers. The order is unusual, but that's the thing with being disorganized.

Here are the things that struck me:

1. The Powell dude is incredibly cultured. The breadth and depth of his knowledge is astounding.

2. He's a [consummate]{#SPELLING_ERROR_0 .blsp-spelling-corrected} master of language. He then goes further and adds quirks that you can only do if you really understand the rules. I think this is partly because of the distance in time between him writing and me reading. In other words everyone talked like that then. The quirks I'm talking about manifest themselves in oddly contracted sentences. Far out daddy-o!

3. I find the whole thing quite cold and cerebral, with an elegiac quality.