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.

Some of my favorite lines/details:

• "feeling as though he had a bone in his tongue"

• "[Count Dracula had] an enormous penis, which on holidays he tied to a chaffinch and let the bird carry for him on the long silk thread as it flew ahead"

• Dream hunters, who follow the same figure from the dreams of one person to the next, until the terminal loop of two people dreaming of each other is achieved, or, if it isn't, until they can compile a hagiography of the dreamed figure across different people's imaginations (iirc these weren't two separate possibilities for the dream hunters--either one is true, or the other one is, depending on which account you believe). Their scripture is a dictionary about themselves compiled by others (this book)

• A book written in poison ink so the reader dies if she reads too quickly, passed down as an heirloom with each generation dividing it in two again (also this book)

• The fake Khazars, or the Khazar's doubles, who would sometimes speak the Khazar language, but only for the lifetime of a strand of hair (apparently 3-4 years), and could lose the ability in the middle of a sentence. One of them had all the important information about the Khazars tattooed on his body aka "the great parchment" (not confirmed the be this book, but I would assume)

• Maybe every third character turns out to be satan, which really vindicates my 95 year old catholic grandma

• 2/3 of the way through reading this I had to travel and downloaded an ebook of it, and I was thrilled to find that it is meticulously hyperlinked. One of the rare pre-ebook books for which reading a digital copy provides a really new and interesting experience, not just convenience

• "one of those journeys were every step is a letter, every path a sentence, and every stop a number in a large book" ahh right one of those

(I'm sure I had some negative things to say too, probably about how the intro is the author being a little too impressed with himself / not quite allowing the book to speak for itself, but I forgot them)