Right after I finished Irving, I picked up Edward Rutherford’s Sarum, a novel I have checked out from the library at least three times over the last five years and have always failed to even crack the spine on. 1000 pages is a pretty huge time commitment and I just never had that much time on my hands to devote to a novel I was maybe only minimally interested in. (That said, Diana Gabaldon's novels are always the exception and I will pretty much always be able to dive into her 1000 page novels about Jamie and Claire, without hesitation.)
But alas, when you become a traveler, you find yourself with many free hours to kill on trains, planes and buses. Suddenly a 1000 page fictional history of Salisbury, England isn’t all that daunting anymore. And reading a history seemed quite apropos as I was flitting about Europe, visiting places similarly brimming with history. I especially enjoyed the descriptions on how the masons built the massive cathedral; we had just climbed to the top of the Cologne Cathedral a couple days before I read that passage and it gave me a better picture of just how much skill and craftsmanship went into building those structures.
Not only did I enjoy the incredibly detailed descriptions of life in England over the last 3000 years, I really became obsessed with the genealogy. It was really interesting how Rutherfurd creates two strong family lines and then passes down the family characteristics to each generation. It made me wonder about my family tree and what might have happened to my great-great-great grandparents. Who were they, what did they do and where did they live? If only we all had detailed descriptions of our family's legacy.
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