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A riotous meta-fictional journey, alternating between The Reader's quest to complete reading fragments of novels and the unfinished stories he finds on the way. Knowingly pretentious and ridiculous, the author muses on the intertwined processes of writing and reading.

I wanted to like this, but the prose was often awkward, the dialogue unimaginative, and the exposition was too blatant. Grand events are glossed over in single sentences, then nothing happens for whole chapters. Rather than weaving a thrilling narrative of a possible near future, this is really a repetitive and surprisingly dull series of essays that make up an over-optimistic manifesto for solving climate change.

A scholarly but engaging deep dive into the origins of the Indo-European peoples. Genetic studies have updated things since this was written, but the broad analysis has stood the test of time because Mallory was uninterested in peddling pet theories.