I think if I had discovered this book when I was twelve I would've devoured it voraciously, given it five stars, and carried it with me always like a personal paperback bible for awhile. It's a great gift for any young, inquisitive, precocious kid who loves to read and asks a lot of open-ended questions.

I stumbled across this book randomly at a used bookshop in Canyon Country (Santa Clarita, CA) on a roadtrip to Joshua Tree back in April. I picked this book up and down throughout the last four months and finally finished it late-July.

I wouldn't call it a page-turner. It's really two books in one. It's fictitious-fantasy (entertainment) and factual-history (education).

The beginning of the novel was heavily focused on history lessons of specific philosophers and time periods so at times the storyline fell flat and the influx of historical information: names, dates and ideologies one after the other felt dense for my brain-head (first half). Not much happens other than history lessons and the prose are not the main pinnacle or purpose of this book per se.

Towards the end it gets interesting plot wise with the characters and I found myself wishing there were more philosophical pages on absurdists for example. The ideologies of philosophers and schools of thought are purely introductory and give the reader a nice big picture, overview. The words aren't difficult to read, but I'd approach each chapter like a 7th grade history class...just take it in a chapter at a time, over many weeks and let the lessons marinate over the weekends.

Would I read this book again cover to cover? No. However, in the words of Maria Popova, "Literature is the original Internet – every footnote, every citation, every allusion is essentially a hyperlink to another text, to another mind."

Jostein Gaarder's book has gifted readers with plenty of fun cliffs to jump off and who knows where we will fly (or fall) off to next.