December 6, Monday night -- Reading Chaim Potok

While recovering from foot surgery....

Being read The Chosen, by Chaim Potok, via Skype by my friend, Elizabeth, who told me about the book at the first holiday party I dared to venture out to. At the party, and I'm not sure if a glass of wine added to her enthusiasm or not, but Elizabeth raved about the book. She said she loved it so much she wanted to read it aloud to me. But, we live on opposite sides of town and she only had time to read late at night. So, we did what anyone else would have done. We set up a time to Skype.

When the time came for our Skype appointment I was in the middle of reading the second book in the Millennium/Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy by Stieg Larsson. These books, as most anyone who's read the trilogy can attest to, are hard to put down.

I had an ethical dilemma. I wondered if multitasking, or rather, multi-reading, would be okay. I asked myself, would it be okay to keep reading the Stieg Larsson book while Elizabeth read, and just keep it in my lap, out of sight from the camera on the top of my laptop?

As it turned out, The Chosen was good enough to lay aside the Stieg Larsson book completely. I wasn't even tempted.

The story is about a friendship between two boys raised in a Jewish community in Brooklyn. The scene she read described a baseball game in which the two boys, who were on different teams, would meet each other, but we didn't get as far as their meeting.

Elizabeth was disappointed. I wasn't. It was good, I told her. She insisted that the magic she felt while reading it was not in the first few pages. I said it was. She was still disappointed. The problem, I think, was that she was carrying the whole book inside of her and any one scene just didn't match up to the whole.

Thanks, Elizabeth!