This has been on my list forever, and it did not disappoint.
The author warns in the Preliminary Notes that one should consider reading it non-linearly, but I wonder if that was even necessary: I found myself unable to read two "consecutive" entries, and instead inevitably jumped around the book following cross-references; I'm only 95% sure I've actually read all of it. That little space of doubt that you've actually seen the whole picture--or maybe that certainty that you haven't, even if you were to dogmatically go page-by-page--gives the whole experience a sense of labyrinthine untethered-ness that I've never quite had when reading before. (Maybe a bit in eNcYcLoPeDic nOvEls Gravity's Rainbow and Moby Dick? Certainly Borges has described it better than anyone, but that's different than trying to create it physically in the world.)
This book is a combination of being in a lovely Wikipedia rabbit hole (thirteen years before Wikipedia) with getting lost in a perfectly rundown/mysterious/liminal bookstore on a street that looks like Bruges, approaching the Gnostic/Kabbalist/Sufi mysteries in studying a people and place halfway between history and fairy tale from both sides: the emergent complexity of compiling an encyclopedia reaching up towards the Khazars, and the tragic simplification of some kind of divine insight reaching down to them. For my fellow Ligottiheads, you might find this on the shelf at that bookstore in Vastarien if it was 30% less evil.
