I am an Eclectic Reader....

addicted to the escape provided by a good book, I always have one (or four) in progress. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss; modern Jewish-American fiction, a blend of post-Holocaust and narrative by bright young children. A young Jewish author in Nazi occupied Poland, inspired to write a manuscript by the young woman he hopes to marry, hands the book off to a friend who is leaving Europe for South America. The writer's intended is sent to New York by her family to escape Hitler; the writer himself is trapped, but survives in the forests thru the rest of the Nazi occupation. He is assumed to have perished like all the rest....then the plot gets complicated as 60 years later the book resurfaces. A wealthy man commissions it's translation from Spanish to English; the children of the young, widowed translator try to do a little match-making to make their sad mother happy again. The first-person narratives, especially by the elderly author, are touching, with shadows and echos of lost people woven into the story in unexpected ways.