Don't judge a book by it's cover. Colin Thubron's journey across the Silk Road from China to Turkey looks like it will be good. It is not.

Thubron writes his interactions with the people he meets in an interesting fashion, and the brief histories he provides are nice vignettes. But most of the book is taken up with insipid descriptions of the landscape and plodding introspection. In both of these instances, it seems not like a failure of imagination, but a failure of the writing, which is not engaging enough to take the reader on this seven-thousand-mile journey.

This story has great potential, and so the book is just interesting enough to finish. But ultimately the kernels that would make this book a good read sit like a mirage on the horizon, always one chapter away, and Thubron's writing never gets you there.