Some of his earlier stuff like Carrion Comfort is also quite fun, and compared with his more recent books, a very great deal less pretentious.

I liked Hyperion et al., though some aspects really annoyed me (at some point, it felt like he had to fit in an equivalent to everything that was in Dune, Riverworld and other classics of SF, notably).

I can't say that I enjoyed Illium/Olympos all that much (especially the second one). There's something... I don't know.. over done and over researched going on with Simmons, but he is also not very constant. Some of the ways he wove Homer into those books is really brilliant, some of it is just plain tedious and felt like he worked too hard to include stuff only experts in the works will really enjoy but he ended up being a show off more than anything (I enjoy someone like Eco doing that in his novels, but it's never mediocre like Simmons can get at times), and then some of it just felt really sub-par and uninspired.

It's too bad about Drood. I have read one or two of the other Drood-inspired/centered books (weirdly, Drood thus became my introduction to Dickens himself, after reading a fun Italian mystery novel in my teens - it alternated between the text of Drood and the novel as I remember it) and I was very tempted to pick the Simmons, but I had misgivings after a few reviews and I think Camilla just finished to convince me it will have way too much of the same stuff that irritated me with Illium/Olympos.