The Historian

Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian was an incredibly slow, dry book. There was a good amount of suspense and spookiness surrounding the search for Dracula that spans three generations. But there was a whole lot of history mixed in. I found myself unable to read large chunks at once, because my mind would start to wander.

That's not to say it was a bad book, though. The horror was good and some passages were genuinely frightening. It's just that it was mixed in with an incredibly thorough history lesson about the conquest of Transylvania, Hungary, and Bulgaria by the Ottoman Empire. There's a lot of allusion to the historical and present-day conflict between Islam and Christianity in the region. And the legend of Vlad the Impaler is interwoven so seamlessly that I has trouble telling what was fact and what was fiction at times.

There was a lot of cool speculation about the legend of Vlad Dracula. And I really liked seeing how that intersected with history. Although I don't know enough about the actual history of the region to untangle everything. Still, I feel like I learned a lot.

Ultimately, I think your appreciation for this book will be directly proportional to your interest in both Dracula and Eastern European history. It may take a while to read, but that's okay. Just keep another book on hand for when you need to switch to something lighter.

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