The Dean of British travel writers takes the Silk Road from China to Turkey and the NY Times says, “Thubron goes to places most other sojourners can’t — because they’re not so much geographic locations as states of mind.” It’s true: Thubron is so elegaic I could barely follow him. There are periods of great lucidity that bring to focus western China in ways I’ve never seen them and then there’s the majority of the book, which requires heavy slogging through knee-deep prose and ankle twisting constructions that make the book exhausting. I only got as far as Kyrghistan. October 2007.