Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

★★★

I think to fully appreciate this book, you should approach it like you would a book of poetry: flip through the pages, and read only the passages that catch your mood.

Unfortunately, I approached it like a novel... It has an interesting premise, and starts out well enough, but I admit that I got bored of it by the end. The book is basically a collection of one or two page descriptions of imaginary cities, the idea being that Marco Polo is describing the cities to Kublai Khan. Really, the book seems to be somewhat of a poetry / novel hybrid. One after another, fantastic and bizarre cities are described. Some of the cities are really quite inventive. But after around the 30th city (the book has more than 50!), I just got kind of tired of it.