I have decided I am not smart enough to read this book. I spend so much time digesting each sentence that I can't link it to the one that came before or the one that comes after. Maybe some of it is my lack of religious knowledge or my inability to keep character names straight, but for whatever reason, I'm giving up on this one at page 104. 
 Favorite Quotes: 
 Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky. 'I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you,' and thusly and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the night. 
 Now, at the end of each gymnastic night, he slept easily and long, as if he had never been plagued by dream-women, as if he had never hoped to lose his heart. 
 Everywhere, noise and elbows. 
 A poet's work...To name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep. 
 [For my own FYI: "The Satanic Verses is a complex narrative that tells several stories within a story in a manner that has been compared to A Thousand and One Nights. The central story concerns two men who miraculously survive a terrorist attack on an Air India flight. Gibreel Farishta, a famous Indian actor, acquires a halo; Saladin Chamcha, whose occupation involves providing voices for radio and television programs, metamorphoses into a satyr-like creature. Gibreel becomes deluded into thinking he is the archangel Gabriel, and much of the novel is preoccupied with a number of his dreams, which take on the form of parables. Each story, including the controversial tale concerning Mahound, comments on religion and its demands. The novel concludes with a confrontation between Gibreel and Saladin, but at this point the difference between which character is good and which evil has been blurred beyond distinction." - Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2009.]