People of the Book

This book was good enough to win the Pulitzer Prize, but evidently I'm even pickier than the prize committee. I'm so close to finishing the thing, but only because I've been pushing myself to read just one more chapter, to renew one more time... Am I way too picky in my demands of an author's work? Perhaps I'm just reading Brooks at the wrong time in my life.
In a nutshell, this is the history of a book, a Jewish text called a haggadah. Every other chapter concerns the rare books expert who is examining the codex in the present-day; the remaining chapters each concern themselves with a period in the book's history. Both the book's setup and the book's characters seemed predictable and shallow--I must be missing something big here. Maybe in a couple of years I'll revisit this one.