The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

It is all too fitting that the only book owned by the “English Patient,” in Michael Ondaatje’s novel of the same name, is a copy of Herodotus’s histories. For Herodotus is the least linear of the historians, the most willing to wander off into fascinating tangents, and the one who is the quickest to present his reader with hearsay and deceiving fictions…