people of the book

"People of the Book" by Geraldine Brooks is dazzling and masterful and sublime. I loved it madly. She takes a historical Jewish book and imagines how it came to exist. The frame story is a rare book researcher examining the book and finding different marks on it - salt, an insect wing, wine stain. Then the story goes back into history and explains what happened - in a Jewish ghetto in Venice, a young girl during the Holocaust and a Muslim in a harem. The mystery compels the story forward while the historical aspects reveal a history of anti-Semitism. It's a great gift to readers and those who fully believe the secret of life is in a book.

I also read "The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance" by Elna Baker and found it quite a hoot. Yes, it's a memoir by someone in her mid-30s or so, but it's hilarious. My favorite part was the section about her job as an actor at FAO Schwartz pretending to be a nurse looking for adoptive homes for babies. Also there's a hilarious story of how her Halloween costume as a fortune cookie went awry. She finds a lot of humor in the fact that she's a believing Mormon in hedonic NYC and loves both worlds fully. She is involved in the Mormon social activities and works at Letterman and Nobu. She also was obese and lost 80 pounds.