I don't have time to blog, but I am doing it anyway.

I just finished The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova two days ago and it was super amazing. I love books about history. Or traveling. Or adventure. When I was a kid I read a ton of fantasy (I mean, that and historical fiction was pretty much all I read), which is full of ordinary kids who one day wake up and have great adventures. So I spent a lot of my childhood waiting for my great adventure to start. If someone had told me when I was ten or eleven that I had magical powers or that my family had been kidnapped by vampires or that I had to go questing in some distant world, I would not have been surprised at all. I was ready to go, seriously. I was always on the lookout for talking dogs or weird omens or prophecies. It has been a huge disappointment to get older and realize that fiction really is fictional.

Anyway, The Historian was beautifully written and one of the most exciting stories I've read in a long time (Special Topics comes pretty close, but I think I actually liked The Historian better). It was at times horribly frightening (I was reading part of it on a very, very quiet airplane and when the pilot came on over the loudspeaker I almost jumped out of my skin), but also extraordinarily engaging and well-researched. I read that Kostova spent ten years doing the research for it, and you can tell she really knows her stuff. Plus the settings were really cool (Amsterdam, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Hungary) and very believable.

I would like someone else (ahem Macky, Sarah, or Lanie) to read this so I can discuss the ending with them, which I think was quite possibly my favorite part of the whole book. God. Whenever I read a passage that is particularly well-written or captivating, especially if it's an ending, I get this tight constricted feeling in my chest and it is hard for me to breathe and I have to read it again and again. I seem to experience books in a very physical way.

I said I'd write about On Beauty and The Corrections in this entry, but I have an epic book organizing project ahead of me and there isn't time right now. I am undertaking the huge task of alphabetizing and categorizing my books, as well as drawing up a preliminary list of books to take with me to Yale.