yeah this is by far the most challenging read on this list thus far. To tell the truth, after Mahound, I ended up printing out a chapter-by-chapter summary of the book so I could read it in more than just chapter chunks while intermittently reading a brief summary just to make sure I was processing everything right. I've read that for anyone who's not particularly well-versed in Muslim or South Asian history and culture (myself included), a lot of the book will fly over your head. Fortunately, I did pick up on a couple of references just because I'd occasionally remember something from my AP world history class's unit on Dar-Al Islam (the bit about Billy Battuta owning a business called "Battuta's Travels" did get a chuckle out of me), but yeah, let's be real, probably a fair bit of this went over my head. Despite that, though, this book is amazing. This is maybe one of the most insane things ever written, it's like if Thomas Pynchon wrote Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens and then the book was edited and vandalized by Kurt Vonnegut, Hermann Hesse, and Milan Kundera. It's a book full of ridiculous plots and stories revolving around Gibreel and Saladin featuring an incredibly expansive cast of characters including a guy named Jumpy Joshi rest in peace Jumpy Joshi. Really my only complaint is that I just didn't care that much about the dream sequences that riddle a copious amount of this book. Like I get it's thematically important but if anything convinced me to print a chapter-by-chapter summary it was definitely that. anyway good book
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