I have read both of Eugenides other books: The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. In fact, I liked the latter so much, I even own after having it seen it discounted at Chapters. I don’t really buy new books often. I have enjoyed his work. It’s really in the characters, prose and to a certain extent, how good Eugenides is about writing about gender and relationships. With TVS, the characters seem both real and mythical. That worked was definitely filled with nostalgia and a surreality. But it was in Middlesex in which I found him to be a very good writer. The characters in it were believable, good and real. In the Marriage Plot and in Middlesex especially, he deals with sex, gender, feminism, and these ideas in Western society. I don’t mean to say he is very political about it, but he shows an understanding of these topics or the awareness of it between cultures. There’s a moment in Paris where one of the main characters sees a woman (p.157):

When Mitchell looked at her; the girl did an amazing thing: she looked back. She met his gaze with frank meaning. Not that she wanted to have sex with him, necessarily. Only that she was happy to acknowledge, on this late-summer evening, that he was a man and she was a woman, and if he found her attractive, that was all right with her. No American girl had ever looked at Mitchell like that.

The book is one largely about relationships, desire, unrequited love and being in love, both good and bad: “What was interesting about being the needy one was how much in love you felt” (p 25) Which isn’t all about how love is, but it does describe the early rush of it and that neediness you feel to be with the other person.

Furthermore, Eugenides has touched on mental illness lightly before, but he tackles it much more in this book as one of the characters seems clinically depressed and the consequences on the other characters, both direct and indirect.

There isn’t a lot of plot in Eugenides books, but it’s not as slow moving as some other novels. I think like many good stories, there is actual growth or movement for all the characters, but like life, it’s not perfect. The ending was sort of meta and fitting. Maybe a bit abrupt, but somewhat realistic and showed a lot of growth in all the characters.

Read on January 3rd, 2012.

A friend recommended this to me, and another friend told me that it was making its way round her workplace at library too. I hadn’t really heard about this book until they mentioned it to me. I was told that it was very layered and well constructed. For the most part, I agree. There are personal mysteries to it and unlike in real life, there are pieces of the puzzle that give you almost a full picture of what happened. I’ve read so many books and seen so many movies and TV shows that I saw the “twist” coming. But that doesn’t necessarily make things bad. Even when you predict things in fiction, you can still appreciate the journey and how it makes you feel. In this case, I felt satisfied with the ending. It was a decent book. The prose was not particularly unique or provocative, but I think the strength is in the plot and construction. I didn’t feel I knew many of the characters particularly well except perhaps Cassandra. Again, it feels more plot oriented in that way. It’s not a short read, but I would recommend it to those who like reading about personal history and mysteries.

Read January 22-23, 2011.

I have read or listened in audiobook all the Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle canon. I really enjoy the Holmes and Watson partnership. Watson humanizes Holmes and the pacing and the writing of some of the Holmes stories are fun and very good. I admit some of the later stories seem a bit forced and Study in Scarlet is a bit odd at times, but all in all, I really like the Holmes stories and their adaptations.

House of Silk is the first novel authorized by the Conan Doyle estate. I think it’s a very good adaptation of the original novels. The characterization, the atmosphere and the plotting evoke the original stories. I enjoyed myself and I think casual Holmes fans would.

It’s not a particularly long novel, but there were a number of murders before hitting the climax and the denouement. It was quite dire at times for Holmes and Watson, but it made for addictive reading. I read this book quickly which is good because it was unrenewable and due the next day.

The only thing that is markedly different is that there is slightly more social commentary about the times and the climax is much darker than Conan Doyle would ever written. It’s not unrealistic per se, but the darkness of the plot revealed at the end is more common in modern books. I did not mind this because I could have seen this happening in Holmes’s setting but Doyle probably couldn’t have gotten it published in his time.

On a lighter note, I’ll end with quotation from the book said by Holmes reflecting on what he could do if he didn’t do detective work: “I have always had a fancy to keep bees.”

Read on January 16th, 2012.

The premise of this book made me pick it up. I like the whole, “What if you wake up and you’re older than you were the day before?” premise. It would be fascinating to see how one and the life has changed. Sophie Kinsella did a similar one in Remember Me? but that one was more light hearted. This one was also chick lit but focussed more seriously on women in their middle age. There are three narratives in this novel with three different women. The main one is Alice’s third person omniscient limited perspective. Second is her sister’s first person writing to her therapist and followed by their grandmother’s letters to an old lover. While this allows for different perspective on the whole situation and you find out more about the characters, sometimes, it’s not obvious how the three narratives are connected until much later. I found it a bit too much especially since there is a lot of jumping back and forth about people’s memories at times. I also didn’t feel I got a good sense of all these women until the very end, but the drama and the mystery of their lives kept me reading. Alice grew on me and I liked the epilogue, but this book didn’t capture me for most of the book.