Piranesi is one of three books I got from this video of someone asking Harvard students for fiction recommendations, along with Middlemarch and Siddhartha. It came up in conversation:
You don’t know what’s going on for the first 50 pages. Then once you figure it out, you can’t stop reading.
Someone else in the video rated it “15 out of 10.” That’s the kind of overselling I’m susceptible to.