Maybe it's all the Lost I've been watching lately, but I found reading this novel like hacking my way through a surrealistically lush jungle—in a good way, most of the time. Rushdie's signature gleeful prose blooms in its full glory from page one and doesn't stop for over four hundred pages, so that at times it goes beyond dazzling, decaying into something murky, exhausting, even academically fey. When I was in college, I accused a then-boyfriend (in all earnestness) of being a "racist Brit" because he declared a distaste for Rushdie's "florid" style, and there were moments when I felt that this novel was some kind of payback. But let me not be mistaken: Rushdie is some kind of genius, and whatever else it might be, The Moor's Last Sigh is not disappointing.

I will continue to recommend Midnight's Children and Haroun and the Sea of Stories to Rushdie novices, but if you enjoyed those, read this one too.