You may have wondered why I haven’t posted on this blog since the beginning of October. I have been rather busy reading (and as you can see in this picture, carving one big pumpkin)!

Anyway, I signed up for Carl’s RIP II challenge at the end of August, with the intention of reading four books. I just finished my second book this evening and with the 31st right around the corner, I am not even going to attempt the last two, since I have this book sitting on my nightstand waiting for me to read for my November book club meeting.

I just finished The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which is almost a whopping seven hundred pages.

Like an elaborately wrapped gift, The Historian needs to be unwrapped slowly and savored for the wonderful story within. In the book, the narrator finds a strange book with a dragon illustration in her father’s private library. With this discovery she begins to learn about her father’s past and the “dragon” book which mysteriously appeared to him years before and how it lead to his obsession with Vlad the Impaler (or the real life Dracula). We go on to learn about his search for his beloved missing professor (who also received a copy of the same strange book) and the love affair he had with the narrator’s long dead mother. All this coincides with the narrators own research on the legend of Dracula and subsequent search for her own father, who eventually goes missing.

Kostova’s writing is beautifully discriptive and meticulously detailed. I was able to picture clearly the house she describes here (pg. 467):

Above the foundation the walls were brick, but brick of the softest, mellowest red-gold, as if they had been soaking in sunlight for generations. The roof was of fluted red ceramic tiles. Roof and walls were a little dilapidated. The whole house looked as if it had grown slowly out of the earth and was now slowly returning to it, and as if the trees had grown above it simply to shade this process.

Beautiful, isn’t it? Having said that, there was a bit of a lull within the book, right around page 500, which made getting through the latter half of it a little difficult. All in all, The Historian was a really interesting read and I would highly recommend it, although make sure you have plenty of reading time ahead of you before you start it. This was really the perfect end to the spooky book challenge!

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