This was a book about books, and I appreciated reading it. The main character is a literature-loving introvert, and I appreciated that too. But I never connected with the book's rambling style - it's a lot like taking a college course with the most eccentric teacher on staff. You finish the semester knowing more than you did when you started, but you're not sure how or why you learned what you did. Aaliya was an interesting character in theory, but during a lot of the book, I felt like it was the author sharing his own name-dropping essays with using Aaliya as the mouthpiece. Which, yes, that's what literature often is, but it's not usually meant to be obvious. 
 I will say that I put the book down for a couple of days with about 50 pages to go, and when I picked it back up and finished it, I enjoyed those last 50 pages more than the rest of the book. Maybe that's how this book is meant to be read - in fits and starts, with breaks in between.