It’s not often I select a book without knowing anything about it, without having heard about it in a story or on the radio, without a recommendation from a friend. But thanks to a couple of books I had in mind being not available at my local library, I stumbled upon Dominic Smith’s “The Electric Hotel,” a work of historical fiction focused on a troupe of silent filmmakers.

I was a little concerned at first that this would end up being one of those books you feel like you have to finish even though it doesn’t interest you that much. But I’m happy to say that things picked up pretty quickly and grabbed my attention, roughly around the point a young Claude Ballard began traveling as an exhibitor of a new movie projection system that blew away anything people had seen before.

What I loved about this book was the nostalgia by extension that Smith makes you feel as an older Ballard is brought back to these times by a young film student, who completely to Ballard’s surprise is enamored by his work and the groundbreaking things he and his contemporaries pioneered that still resonate in current cinema.

And how cool to be transported back to a time when having sound on film wasn’t even a thought, when telling a story happened mostly in pictures, in the craft of positioning and framing and movement. Smith shows you Ballard’s viewfinder as the camera films the opening shot of his masterpiece. You see a sweeping vision of a newly electrified hotel at night, beckoning to weary travelers driving by. You see a set I have thought about for weeks, a cutaway, dollhouse style of people going about their business in the hotel, something you might see in vivid color now from Wes Anderson. The camera sweeps above a tiger on the front porch and up to a woman, famed actress Sabine Montrose. The audience doesn’t know yet that she’s dying. Or that the men inside can’t help but to love her. Or that Claude himself does, too.

I don’t always love stories that bounce back and forth in time, but Smith makes it work in a way that reveals things about young Claude through his older self, and vice-versa.

Overall a fun, satisfying start to my reading year and the kind of book that would be perfect for a couple of days sitting on a beach or curled up watching a snow storm.