Bookish Thoughts

Years ago I read and loved Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian . So I didn't think too hard when I saw this book at the library book sale. It just went straight into my bag. I guess I assumed that it would be about vampires, too. And I was mildly disappointed to discover that there was nothing at all supernatural here. This is the story of a woman who travels to Bulgaria. She accidentally takes the bag of a family when she helps them into a taxi, and when she discovers that the bag contains a man's ashes she vows to return it to the family. Her own taxi driver agrees with this, frankly insane, decision and they spend the next several days driving all over the country, slowly learning about the life of the man whose ashes they carry. The man's life story is told in parallel through flashbacks and stories. His story was the more interesting of the two, and finding out what happened to him is what propelled me through the book. I learned a lot about Bulgarian history tha...

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 hist...