Should I bother with the rest of 'A Dance to the Music of Time'?

yeah

read 1 from somewhere in the middle of the cycle a bunch of years ago (forget the title, it's set during the 2nd world war) & liked it enough that i resolved to some day read the whole lot of em from the beginning

started doing that thing a few days ago & so far, 2 thumbs up

imo best way through it is taking it as individual short novels - roughly the same length as his earlier comic novels or Decline and Fall by Waugh, say - rather than the big “seasonal” blocks.

i know there are those who can’t stand the fetishising of the decadence of the english class system and its artefacts but i really enjoyed it, particularly 1-6 ie up to and including The Kindly Ones.

my gf is reading this atm and enjoying it, will press her for more detail later

The sequence as a whole definitely follows a hump-shaped curve - slow to start, peaking around the middle, a steep decline in the last couple of books (although they still have their moments).

Oh yes, she says the first book was heavy going but 2 and 3 are excellent and very funny

i must admit i think the first three are as good as anything else in the sequence. agreed the last few have their moments and the arc of widmerpool is grotesque and fascinating.

I started this a few years ago and stalled after the first book. I enjoyed it but I felt the creeping fatigue of what Fizzles called 'the fetishising of the decadence of the english class system and its artefacts' even in that short book .

Tolerance for the first book depends on how much of goings on in a quasi-Eton setting you can take, I suppose. Much of it reads like a slightly melancholic version of Jennings & Derbyshire. But the early appearances of Widmerpool and Uncle Giles lend it an air of absurdity and are already well-realised comic characters with (in Widmerpool's case) a sinister edge. It "opens up" more in subsequent books and (FWIW) the war trilogy is some of the best writing about WWII that I have read.

Melancholic version of Jennings? I'm nicking it off her when she's done