This weekend I had the great pleasure of reading "The Chosen" by Chaim Potok for the first time, but probably not the last time. I think this is probably one of those books that everyone else read in high school (I found it on the "Summer Reading for High School" table at Barnes and Noble) but somehow I didn't pick up until now. I'm glad I read it, and I would really recommend it to anyone looking for the kind of book that just makes you feel what an enormous privilege it is to be literate. On that note, a digression from the book review:

One reason that I read fiction is because a good writer can use their story to help you sympathize with a character, even if you have nothing in common with that character. That's a valuable exercise. As human beings, I think our tendency is to only consider things from our point of view, shaped by our own upbringing and life experience. That, in turn, can lead us to judge people too quickly because we don't understand anything about the forces that have shaped their lives and the point of view that they hold. I know it's pretty easy for me to judge people. One way to avoid that is to make a conscious effort to try to imagine how other people feel about a situation. Reading fiction is one thing that has helped me practice doing that. I also read because I don't want my view on the world to be as narrow as my personal experience. Within the limitations of time and space, I can only really experience my life, as a white, middle class girl from a loving family in the Deep South who went to college, has a fantastic husband and a baby on the way. That's a wonderful life, and I wouldn't trade it. But it means that outside of reading or extensive world travel, I'm probably never going to know what it's like to live in, say, Turkey. World travel is expensive, so I read.

Maybe it's for that reason that the most satisfying books, to me, are the ones that allow me to really understand something new about other people or a time in history other than my own. I suppose I could pick up a history textbook and learn the same things, but I'm a story person, and I don't find the facts alone particularly compelling. I don't think I'm alone in that. Even the Bible reflects the human gravitation to stories. If you notice, Jesus told an awful lot of stories to help people understand the things he was teaching them.

The Chosen was helpful both in the category of human understanding and in terms of providing a great overview of the history behind the creation of the modern day nation of Israel. I know that the history of that part of the Middle East is extremely relevant to any discussion of what is going on in our world today, but to someone born in the 1980s, the conflict in that part of the world can seem inexplicable, unrtraceable, and too enormous to even try to unravel. So it was very enlightening to read a novel set against the backdrop of at least a small part of that story, the creation of Israel as a nation. I am also, I discovered, largely ignorant about Judaism, and so it was interesting to learn a little about that religion, albeit from an extremely orthodox perspective.

In the human category, well, I've never been a teenage boy, or a post-World War II American Jew, never known the weight of being part of a religious community for whom persecution is not a distant memory, and I've never been destined from birth to succeed my father in the leadership of an entire community of people. Really, even if I just tried to imagine that I was all those things, it's so far removed from my own experience that I don't think I could do it. But the book made it easy because the narrator and the story were so compelling.

"The Chosen" is also remarkably easy to read, and I used it as a break from another book I'm reading right now that is good but not particularly easy reading. This is why it's good to buy more than one book at a time. But that's another post for another day.

Happy summer reading, everyone. Please tell me about any good books you've read lately. I'm always looking.