Alif the Unseen

Really enjoyed this. Pretty solid story in its own right, and it's pretty rare for a book so steeped in Islam to come to my (or mainstream, really) attention. I'm glad it did. Not so many new (to me) frontiers left to discover these days.

Several times while reading, something struck me as strange, and I realized that it only seemed strange because of my lack of familiarity; recast in more familiar terms, most of it became totally normal, and I realized I needed to recalibrate.

The story involves a fair bit of computing; it isn't all practical, but it's plainly written by someone who understands what they're writing about, which is so rare in creative media.

I haven't read as much this year as I'd like, and it's partly because some of what I've read hasn't pulled my attention back to it, so that I wanted, when I wasn't reading, to go read. This did.