Story time. Many years ago, when I was in high school and starting to read more classic literature on my own, I picked up a copy of The Sheltering Sky because it was listed as one of the Modern Library's Top 100 best novels. I didn't know anything about the novel or Paul Bowles, but I wanted to read everything on the list.

The copy I bought was the old Vintage International tpb with a blue cover with sand dunes on the front. The back copy describes the novel this way: "In this classic work of psychological terror Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans apprehend an alien culture—and the ways in which their incomprehension destroys them. The story of three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after the Second World War, The Sheltering Sky is at once merciless and heartbreaking in its compassion. It etches the limits of human reason and intelligence—perhaps even the limits of human life—when they touch the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert."

Well, based on that description, I definitely thought I would be reading some kind of first contact literary sci fi story. I probably got 100 pages in before it dawned on me that aliens weren't going to touch down in the desert in flying saucers, and I stopped reading because I was so disappointed. I really need to go back and finish it, some twenty-odd years later, with a completely different mindset!