This is one of those rare times that I actually have read a book when it first comes out...and I'm really glad I read this one. It appealed to me on many levels.
I liked how the book was structured.
I liked the narration.
I liked the writing.
I liked the concept (historical revisioninsm)
I know some people who read it hated the footnotes, but I loved them. They weren't disconcerting because I'm very used to dealing with footnotes and deciding when to read them and when not to. It helped that they were actual footnotes and not endnotes, otherwise I'm sure I would've read much fewer of them, even if in being footnotes, there were places where the narration was suspended for pages just to make room for the footnotes.
Not only did I not mind the footnotes, I found myself fascinated by their function in the book. At one point, the story makes reference to Merlin the magician (who we all know from King Arthur) and the footnote attached to that reference is a sentence explaining how Nimue (sorceress apprentice to Merlin) trapped him in a tree with his own magic. It's a story that anyone who's read Arthurian lit might know.
A few pages later, there is reference to a story of a magic ring. This story is not one imported from out culture like the Arthurian one, so the story of the ring (no, it's a different ring...) is footnoted in great detail - the entire note takes several pages to tell this piece of folklore. In one way, it's a bit like all the extra mythology that Tolkien created around his basic story. I found it delightful.
I also was impressed with the care Ms. Clarke took in creating the manuscript, and her understanding of the ways that we gather knowledge about societies that have gone before us. In literary studies, the lives of authors long dead (especially those who didn't have biographers when they were alive), are frequently reconstructed through the letters they wrote and received. [Possession also played with this epistolary-biography assembly]. In one footnote, the source for the information is given as a letter written by Strange to Segundus - it's the kind of footnote one might see in a biography or a historiographic analysis. Thing is, there is no mention in the story, no scene, where Strange writes a letter to Segundus. It takes place behind the scenes, but in including that reference in a footnote, Clarke draws attention to the artificiality of our 'reconstructions' of someone's life through their letters. At the time, the letters weren't worthy of note - years later, they become the cornerstone of our understanding (in some cases at least) of what a writer's life was like.
Even if that last paragraph made no sense, what I'm trying to say is that this book appealed to me as a lover of fantasy fiction, it appealed to me as a lover of a good story (as a reader, you might say) as well as appealing to me as an academic. What more could I ever want from a single book? If you read for any or all of these reasons, you might just love this book as much as I do.