Generally an enjoyable book, with an engaging story. It could’ve been much better, though. While I developed empathy for a few of the characters, I never quite shook the feeling that the characterizations were off, somehow (although one would have to bend relationships in order to present any reasonable cross-section of society – it worked for that Titanic movie, I suppose). The two things that most bothered me, though, were: there was much less coverage of the cathedral-building than I hoped for. I was promised a book about building a cathedral, and I felt let down.
The repetition. I mentioned this before, and was disappointed that it didn’t let up. If anything, the micro-repetition just grew up, so we had larger cycles of repetition. Heck, even one of the characters complained about it.

So ultimately a good but flawed book, and I’d generally not recommend it to people due to its length – one could easily consume two better books in the time it would take to go through this one, and with a potential great increase in actual content.