This better not be a trend: quitting on the Hugo Novel Nominees. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union just won the Nebula for Best Novel, it is written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author (Michael Chabon), and features some excellent alternate history where in 1948 the United States allowed Jewish refugees to settle in Alaska for a period of 60 years.
So why did I stop?
Not because the book is bad, let me that perfectly clear. Sometimes it just isn’t time to read a particular book. Over the past two weeks I’ve tried to read The Yiddish Policeman’s Union in drips and drabs and it just hasn’t worked for me. Two weeks and I was only seventy pages into a book by an author I admire with a subject that I am very much interested in. It wasn’t the right time for me to read this book.
Unlike Halting State, I will come back to The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. This is a major work from a great author and I would be disappointed if I didn’t read it.
I don’t think the prose is flat, but Chabon definitely takes his own sweet time to get the story and the murder investigation rolling.
Some books are worth coming back to. Sometimes the reader isn’t quite ripe enough yet.