Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

This is a book I just started reading that a friend recommended to me, so far I give it two enthusiastic thumbs up.

The book is a series of city descriptions told by Marco Polo (the narrator) to Kublai Khan. Each description is about one to three pages and every five to ten cities or so there is a short conversation between the two men. It reminded me of the class because you discover that all of the city descriptions in the book are actually of the same place.

Section from the book:

Cities & Eyes 5:

"When you have forded the river, when you have crossed the mountain pass, you suddently find before you the city of Moriana, its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the medusa-shaped chandeliers. If this is not your first journey, you already know that cities like this have an obverse: you have only to walk a semi-circle and you will come into view of Moriana's hidden face, an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sackcloths, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tins, behind walls with fading signs, frames of staved-in straw chairs, ropes good only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam.
From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repretory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be seperated nor look at each other."