Middlesex (#21)

Well, I finally caught up with my reading/blogging backlog.  For most of this year, it seems I have been at least 2 books behind ... but kind of as expected, the trip back East proved to be a bit of vacation from reading as well.  Unless our vacations have a good deal of down time (which is rarely the case), a book tends not to get picked up all that much beyond the plane.  I did read a bit while back at the parents and was able to finish this one on the trip home.   

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is the latest Oprah book club pick and, as previously mentioned, a book that has been collecting dust on my shelves for years. Again, for no good reason as I had only heard good things about it.  I will admit to picking it up a time or two over the years and after a few pages determined I wasn't "in the mood" for it.

... and I will admit that it kind of happened again.  But with blessing of O and a bunch of my W&C peeps who had read the book years ago and was glad to see O finally getting around to it, I figured I had to suck it up and get through it.

Sure enough, it won me over and I started to get what all the fuss was about... though again, I will admit to it not really clicking with me until Cal's ancestors immigrated to the States from Greece.

Although many of you have already read the book (hello DeAnn, Craig, and Jen!), I am not giving much away much away telling you that this book is an epic... a novel about the American Dream, immigration, coming of age, and... a hermaphrodite.  Our protagonist is Cal, who, thanks to some interesting and head-spinning familial relations, starts life off as Calliope.  I'm sure I was not alone in thinking that title of the book was simply a play on words of Cal's gender status, but it also ends up being the town where the Stephanides family calls home... so Middlesex is both the journey and a destination.

All in all, an entertaining and quite fascinating read... quite a bit of funny with a few well-rounded doses of heartbreak as well.  The character of Cal is so utterly convincing it seems that Eugenides is regularly questioned (and at times, physically prodded) about whether this is his own Greek family memoir.  Big in scope and certainly a nice and unique book to get lost in...

2007 10K Reading Challenge:  + 527 pages (Total Pages: 6389 pages) 

Comments

[Craig]

Glad you enjoyed it! I'd hate to have given a bad recommendation.

Hmmm... and you've almost managed to shame me into getting my Book Blog Backlog up to date... Almost... ;)

[Augusto (Queer Beacon)]

The book has been on my shelves for a while now, I've read just over 100 pages and decided it wasn't for me. I don't know why exactly, it's certainly well written, but...the whole time I was reading it I was like "I wish this was a David Sedaris, even bad one..."