Samarkand

This is one of those books that is so packed with information that it's like a hallway through history, with doors beckoning to be opened right and left. Like Eco or Borges, Maalouf crafts a fiction blended with facts, but perhaps more convincingly, and at least to my amateur mind, so much that it's hard to tell fact from fiction. Because of this, the book has the feel of a really interesting university lecture. The extra stuff on the syllabus is diving into the novel's two temporal settings, 11th century Seljuk empire Persia, and 20th century revolutionary Iran, and of course, the Rubaiyat and Sufism, Shi'a, Sunni, etc. etc. etc.