Restless Valley

I've been thinking about whether I would have liked this book more on audio (it's not actually available on audio, just hypothetically) or if it would have been entirely too confusing and I can't really decide. It's written by a journalist who spent time in central Asia (particularly focused on the titular Ferghana Valley, which includes territory inside both Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan) and recounts loosely connected stories from his experiences there. I'm usually interested in stories about the former USSR, and there is a lot of stuff here that is attention-grabbing conceptually: murders! corruption! dictators! The way this was organized, though, did not at all work for me. Single stories were broken up in ways that felt jarring and made it hard to remember details that seemed like they should have been important. This is absolutely a symptom of Western privilege, but the names are unfamiliar and so keeping track of the players was a challenge. Some of the financial crimes that went along with the corruption are recounted in levels of detail that at least for me, rendered them obtuse and difficult to follow. It's not like I got nothing out of the book, but it felt like it was actively fighting against my efforts to get drawn into it so it ended up feeling like a slog.