In my last post, maybe I was too hash when I wrote "singularly bewildering and unproductive experience". Even without knowing what the words mean, the book has many things to recommend it. It produces agreeable sounds when read aloud, as I have already mentioned. The letters are all well arranged on the page, printed in an elegant and easy to read font. Paragraph organization is fine; not too short, not too long, and yet with some variety in size to spice things up.
I like the proper nouns I'm encountering, they have personality. It's a bit problematic to differentiate between places and persons, though. Maybe I'm getting the mountain and Mohammad mixed up, so to speak. That notwithstanding, I find myself getting attached to those characters. When their names do not recur for long stretches of prose, I worry that something bad has happened to them in the plot. Maybe they are even dead! My worst fear is that they are indeed dead, but their names keep reappearing like ghosts because other characters are remembering them. This is unlikely, however: introspective passages of that kind do not abound in science fiction.
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