SO I JUST FINISHED MICHAEL CHABON’S The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and it was, well, okay. Given all the great reviews it’s gotten, I was a bit disappointed. The premise is interesting — the founding of Israel failed in 1948, and the U.S. offered a chunk of the Alaska panhandle as a substitute homeland — but Chabon doesn’t really do much with that, considering. Has the Alaska setting changed the people who move there? Not a lot, it seems, or at least Chabon doesn’t show us beyond relatively minor occasional references. Anyway, it’s not bad, but I couldn’t help but think that Harry Turtledove could have done a lot more with the setting. It was one of those books I picked up and put down over a couple of weeks, not one that sucked me into the story. But if you follow the link and look at the reviews you’ll see that a lot of people liked it more than I did.