New Year starting

It's a new year. Tomorrow, I go back to work after a two-week vacation. It's been a good break, but I have to admit that I could easily stay home another week or two...

So, the holidays were good to us. Christmas (before Christmas) with Nick and the kids, Hanukkah with the whole Minnesota family, Christmas Eve with Gabi's mom, Christmas day with Jenny and the kids, Second Hanukkah with friends... and then my anti-social tendencies set in. Don't ask me to cook. Don't ask me to clean. Don' t ask me to think of anything interesting to chat about. I'm done-done-done.

So New Year's Eve was quiet. Gabi wasn't feeling well on the first, so it was quiet too. And I did something so unusual, hedonistic and lovely that I just have to brag about it. I read. For hours. I didn't make anything for anybody. Not crafts, food or conversation. I just curled up and read. New Year's eve day I read Nation by Terry Pratchett. On New Year's I read People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. Just read. Read till my eyes were dry and my butt hurt from sitting.

It was bliss.

So... Nation and People of the Book. Seems like a crazy combination, I'm the first to admit. The oh-so-British parodist with absurdist social commentary on one day and Pulitzer Prize winning historical novelist on the next. But what surprised me is how well the books went together, and the thematic similarities between them.

Nation is not a discworld novel, yet it's still classic Pratchett. The story is about an island boy, Mau, whose entire family and village is swept away by a tsunami, and a very privileged and proper victorian-age English girl, Daphne, who is the lone survivor of a shipwreck on Mau's island. The Blue Lagoon this is not. There's no sex, but there is childbirth and a profane parrot. Pratchett, as is typical for him, combines astute observations about society with humor that is both silly and pointed. Take, for example, Mau's attempt to understand the British obsession with legs (the only thing white people are afraid of ~ sight of an islander without trousers will cause English women to scream in terror and a glimpse of a woman's ankle will cause English men to faint). This befuddlement happens alongside Mau's attempt to make sense of everything he's learned about gods, ancestors, sex roles and gender identity. And Pratchett has something to say ~ or rather, question ~ about all these things.

People of the Book, on the other hand, is a fictionalized account of the Sarajevo haggadah, the Jewish prayerbook used for the Passover service. There is such a book, and it is remarkable in that it's a Jewish prayerbook from the mid 1400's, created with illuminations like those only otherwise found on Christian holy texts, and kept safe from Nazis and the Bosnian war by Muslim clerics and librarians. The real Sarajevo haggadah survived the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of Jews from Spain, and Brooks' novel provides a brilliant imagining of the precious book's creation and travels.

Brooks is never as blatant with her questioning as Pratchett, but they share a surprising number of similar questions: How do we really know what gods/G-d wants from and for us? How can we know whether the knowledge passed down through family and culture is correct? How do we react to barbaric and/or senseless death? What are our obligations to those who are like us and those who are different? What, exactly, are Likeness and Difference?

Both books are well written, intricately plotted, thought-provoking and suspenseful. Both are very much worth ignoring phone calls, chores and any number of other things that could pull you away from the sheer bliss of diving in and voyaging out. Books like these are why we love to read.