Expectations

Yesterday was an exciting day – I finished TWO books that I have been reading for a while. I’ll start with “People of the Book,” by Geraldine Brooks. I was really looking forward to reading this book because I really enjoyed all of her others. I even bought it in hardcover (though it was pretty cheap on Amazon :) ) I had high expectations, but I have to say they were only partially met.

The book is set in 1996 Sarajevo, where a book conservator named Hanna is asked to examine a very old manuscript, an illustrated haggadah (used during the Passover seder) known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. There is an actual Sarajevo Haggadah that inspired the novel, and its real history is fascinating – Geraldine Brooks also wrote a piece in The New Yorker recently about how it was saved from the Nazis by a Muslim librarian during World War II.

Anyway, back to the novel – it alternates between scenes from Hanna’s life and her study of the book, and flashbacks to critical moments in the book’s history, all the way back to its creation in the late 1400s. I would say that the book only half fulfilled my expectations because the historical chapters were very good, but the chapters that focused on Hanna seemed very unrealistic. They reminded me of “The Da Vinci Code,” but not in a good way (contrived plot twists, lame dialogue).

Both of Brooks’ earlier novels were historical fiction, and one of them won a Pulitzer Prize, so I’m hoping that she will return to that genre in her future work :)

I’ll post something soon about the other book I just read, “The Ghost Map,” by Steven Johnson. Stay tuned…