Before I went to England, I went to the bookstore to pick out three books for myself. They were leaving-home presents to myself, and I was going to read one of them before leaving America, and one of them on the plane to England, and one of them right before I left England. So I got a stack of several books, and I was going to decide which I wanted to buy. I sat down on the chair and read the beginnings of all of them, and The Satanic Verses was one of the ones I discarded.

You know what I bought instead? A Hundred Years of Solitude. It starts out really well and I hated it so, so much when I read the whole thing. I disliked it so much that after reading it on trains to and from Cambridge in the week before I left England, I took it to a thrift store in England and I left it there. I didn’t even care enough to bring it home. That’s true.

Anyway, now I really wish I’d brought The Satanic Verses instead. I’ve been so convinced that I was going to hate it that I’ve been refusing to read it, but I finally decided to straighten up and fly right. So voila, I finished reading it last night.

Totally, totally liked it. Not as much as The Ground Beneath Her Feet – i.e., I might reread it but I’ll probably never buy it – but I liked it a lot. It’s about these two guys who fall out of an airplane and they somehow miraculously survive because one of them flaps his arms and they sing and sing, and when they get back to regular life, one of them starts to turn into an angel and the other one into a devil.

Quite interesting. Many, many things happened. Very many exciting plot things. Gibreel’s girlfriend was called Alleluia, and Allie for short, which charmed me. And I felt so happy at the end when Saladin got his proper name back and made up with his father and everyone was friends. I felt so, so happy. I felt just like I felt towards the end of Breakfast on Pluto. And oh, I liked it the nasty revenge that Saladin got on Gibreel, even though it was very wicked and poor Allie didn’t deserve it.

And not to be a jerk, and I don’t in any way think that Salman Rushdie should’ve had a fatwa out on him because that is totally ridiculous, but I can kinda see Ayatollah Khomeini’s point, dude. (But not really.) Because it’s not just about the verses, although that would be upsetting if it were true (apparently it’s apocryphal, you will rejoice to learn), it’s about how that book is for serious not very nice about Muhammed. If I were Muslim and I loved the Muhammed more than my luggage because he’s the Prophet of Allah, this book would sort of hurt my feelings. Actually, even with me not being one tiny bit Muslim, this book made me a little sad how it portrayed Muhammed.

However, Salman Rushdie can write what he damn well wants, and it is just the silliest thing ever that he spent years and years in hiding with security people just because he wrote a book that wasn’t very nice about the Prophet.

The end.

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