Oh, man. I can't seem to finish a book. First with the Henry VIII's wives (which I'm slowly finishing... emphasis on SLOWLY) and then the Salman Rushdie one. It got too wordy. Anyway, this one's pretty wordy too, but in a really sarcastic way, although I have already circled more than a few words to look up in the dictionary later. I bought this at the Holocaust museum when I went there with my sister. I had always heard of it, and several people have told me throughout my life to read it, but I never knew it was Holocaust-related. Just getting into it, but I'm excited every morning to go home and read for a while. Very personal, somewhat fantastical, very engaging.

Oh, my. I just finished. A mesmerizing book. It's an unusual story, told by a narrator who's now a succesful novelist. He's narrating his experiences as a 22-year-old living in New York. He's met two people -- Sophie (an Auchwitz survivor) and her lover, Nathan, who has very unpredictable moods, to say the least. I don't want to give anything away, but there are such strong themes of good v. evil, what happens when the very notion of humanity disappears (as it seems to have done with the Nazis) so that existence itself becomes a sort of vacuum, and how one can live with a kind of suffocating guilt -- and what it takes to be a human being. I'm not sure if this makes sense. I'm at the end of my shift and thus pretty tired. I forgot to bring the book with me today to point out some good quotes.