Rating: 
Summary: Not much to add to other glowing reviews...
Review: ... but this and GILES GOAT-BOY are masterpieces of deconstructed Americana. The depth of Pynchon, the wit of Heller and Roth, the linguistic brilliance of, well, Barth: it's all here.
Rating:
Summary: Barth's best
Review: A brilliant send-up of the historical novel that works on many levels. I'm not sure which I enjoyed more: Barth's comic genius, or his inventive use of language--but both are on display on almost every page of this hefty masterpiece. Highly recommended, especially for fans of Pynchon's Mason & Dixon.
Rating:
Summary: No superlatives, and yet...
Review: Best book I ever read. No favorite colors, films, songs, artists, authors, weather patterns in my life - but one book I'll call the best, the favorite. Twenty-five to thirty years ago I read it over and over again until it's eventual disintegration from use and from its own weight. I still have yellowed clips of paragraphs, retyped (on an IBM Selectric, thank you) and carried in pocket or purse to remind me to change my angle of observation from time to time. Plenty of reviews here to tell you the story, I'm just here to praise it.
Rating:
Summary: The Sot Weed Factor
Review: Everything that could be said about the literary genius of this book is contained in the other reviews here - so l will just add that when l read it over 30 years ago l thought it was the best book l have ever read - now l know it is the best book l've ever read - there is simply no other work of literary fiction that has haunted and beguiled me like this book.
If you haven't read it - give yourself time to adjust to the language and style but stick with it - do not miss this book.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, Funny and Spellbinding
Review: I know it's supposed to spoof historical novels, but I didn't read "The Sot-Weed Factor" that way at all. To me it read like a darkly comic epic, reminiscent of "Water Music" by T. Coraghessan Boyle. I loved the characters, especially the main protagonist, Ebeneezer Cooke, the wannabe Poet Laureate of colonial Maryland. He starts out as a prim, officious twit, but his character is befouled almost continuously from the outset, so that by the end of the book he is a resigned (if not wholly self ironic) and nearly sympathetic character. And I guess that is what makes this book work for me: it follows all the rules for successful story telling. There is a central conflict (and a thousand hilarious ancillary conflicts), a crisis of spectacular proportion, believable resolution, and character transformation. The story is riddled with deception, fraud, betrayal, mistaken identity, errant bravado, sex, scatalogical humor, and enough action and adventure to hold the attention of almost any reader. At 750+ pages, it took me a month to read it (if you travel cross-country, it's perfect for those four-hour plane trips), and now that I'm finished, I'd have to say it was one of the finest months I've ever spent reading. I wish I was starting it all over again for the first time. Haply I'll read it again.
Rating:
Summary: A shame that this is out of print
Review: I recently read an article of personal history in which the author lamented his return to English academe (from whence I write, and, equally, lament). He had thought that he would be reading books such as "The Sotweed Factor," but found that all was criticism and a striving, a most earnest striving, at that, after wind. Interesting is his assumption that TSF is some kind of Moby Dick--difficult, abstruse, philosophical, etc.
This is a great read. I'll skip to the part about the priest being raped by Indian maidens (and this is from memory, so forgive me, I read this in 1993): "she laid her hands on the candle of the carnal mass; and lo! the more she trim it, the more it doth wax! She capped it with the snuffer priests must shun..."
Excellent stuff. I breezed through this on an overseas trip, having at first thought that I had brought the wrong, heavy book.
It's great.
Rating:
Summary: Wildly Funny and Masterfully Written
Review: I wished The Sot-Weed Factor would never end! I didn't realize until turning over the last page at 3 a.m. a few nights ago, how much I had come to care about the Poet-Laureate Ebenezer Cooke and the rest of the zany characters from the Sot-Weed Factor. Between England and Maryland, Ebenezer and his childhood tutor Henry Burlingame bumble into an endless succession of adventures by land and by sea, intertwined with rollicking hijinks which stood my hair on end. One of the most enjoyable features of Sot-Weed is that the dialogue is spoken in a hilarious variety of 18th Century accents. Additionally, Barth is brilliant at building tension and milking every situation for its wit and absurdity. But underneath his spoofing lurks the hand of a master, and the repertoire of linguistic tools which Barth employs in Sot-Weed are a testimony to his great talent. I hope you get as much pleasure from it as I did!
Rating:
Summary: I'll never look at an eggplant the same way again
Review: If you've read the book, then you know exactly what I'm talking about and are probably doubled over in laughter just at the mention of it . . . if you haven't, well there's just one more reason to start reading this. Widely considered Barth's best novel (I'm very much a novice with him, this being only my second book so I'm no man to judge) I can easily see why it deserves such a status. A parody of historical novels, Barth writes the story in the style of that time so it seems like all those books your teachers made you read in high school, but better. The book is massive and concerns the various adventures of would-be poet Ebenezer Cooke, writer of the poem "The Sot-Weed Factor" as he becomes involved, willingly or otherwise, in more situations than any man should reasonably have to undertake. An attempts to summarize the plot are useless, it's too sprawling, people who want instant gratification will be at a loss here, this is a book you have to absorb over the course of a few days and get used to the style before it sinks in just how much fun it is. The characters play everything seriously, making the jokes (and there are plenty, with the funniest of a vulgar nature and often involving the story of Captain John Smith of Pocohantus fame) come off as utterly hilarious, but at the same time Barth manages to make you care just a little bit about them, as quirky as they are, they still come across as typically flawed human beings. Probably the best thing about the book is its sheer unpredictability, not shackled by the morals of the 16th century, anything and everything does happen, nobody is what they seem and situations shift gears so rapidly that it'll make your head spin even as you can't stop laughing. A truimph on nearly every level, this is something a lesser writer would have only managed to turn into a stale stylistic genre exercise, something to wow the kids in the creative writing workshop . . . what Barth creates here is something lasting and no matter what century it was written in or evokes, will probably wind up being timeless.
Rating: 
Summary: Close, but not quite a cigar.
Review: On my trip through the rugged post-modern landscape I chose this book as my introduction to John Barth. As a great fan of Don Quixote, probably the greatest book ever written, and Tom Jones, I greatly enjoyed this offbeat book. The 4 star rating reflects some minor qualms that kept the score at 4.49. In his Goedel, Escher, Bach book Hofstadter deals in great detail with Margritte's famous painting of a pipe with the subtitle "this is not a pipe". Similarly, this book deserves the subtitle "this is not an historical novel", which fitting the post-modern philosophy, is completely intentional. I am a great fan of Fraser's Flashman, a character that the author inserted in many historical situations, decades before Forrest Gump saw the day of light. Barth could obviously done the same with his real life Eben Cooke with regard to the enormous amount of homework he did before writing this tome. His main technique in this book is to start with a normal situation, stretch its reality, keep on stretching and than blow its credibility to the kingdom come. Let there be no doubt that this approach, call it literary corn popping, results in a great number of hilarious situations. Yet, Barth himself realized that this trip through intentionally blown fragments might need a little more sustenance to carry the reader through to the end. This sustenance comes in the form of the subject of identity. Both Eben and his valet Bertrand flip-flop identity continuously yet pale in comparison to Henry Burlingame, who is literally all over the place. Since this story is in many respects more of a coming of age tale than a historical novel I had high expectations when it came to Barth's final resolution of the "identity theme". However, just like in some of le Carre's lesser plots, the final turns and twists surrounding especially Burlingame's identity are an itty bitty disappointing. Still for all people who enjoy the truly hilarious and don't mind to have the literary rug pulled from under them time and again this book comes with the highest recommendations.
Rating:
Summary: A Masterpeice of Satire!
Review: Perhaps most impressive of all of John Barth's picaresque classic is the fact that it succeeds on many levels. It is quite difficult to imagine anyone taking this novel completely seriously, however it can be read as an epic. Most likely it will be enjoyed as a brilliant satire providing most readers with innumerable passages that will have them laughing out loud. However one senses many philosophical statements and themes communicated through the characters' preposterous actions and attitudes. It was the characters, in fact, that impressed me the most about "The Sot-Weed Factor," while appearing at times ridiculous to the point of being hilarious, most readers will likely find a little bit of themselves in characters like Ebenezer Cooke, Henry Burlingame, etc. My favorite character was Ebenezer's servant whose name eludes me at this time. Barth has coined himself a "smiling nihilist" and this book is a fine example of this sentiment, though most readers will likely spend less time smiling and more time doubled over in laughter. A must-read!
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