Tuesday, December 19
Book of the year
OK, it's three years old, but I finally got around to reading it: Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides. I think this is a great book. It's got scope, scale, amazing/beautiful detail, vivid set pieces and a collection of empathic, sympathetic characters spanning three generations of immigrants from Greece who land in Detroit and survive as that city changes from the 1920s to the 1970s. The plot keeps moving, it covers a lot of ground and nearly every character is mostly likeable. It's big, it's ambitious and it works. It fairly earned its Pulitzer Prize because it's a great novel about America. Here's a Powell's interview with the author; another interview by JSF (see below) and a Salon interview. And his Bloomsbury author page.
I read some 35 books this year, and this one stands out as the best. My honorable mentions would have to include Lamb: the Gospel of Biff, Christ's Childhood Friend, the best of the seven or eight Christopher Moore's I read this year, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, which might be the first book I've ever immediately read through a second time after finishing it the first time (which I did back in April) (half of his Everything is Illuminated made me laugh out loud, too).
I read some 35 books this year, and this one stands out as the best. My honorable mentions would have to include Lamb: the Gospel of Biff, Christ's Childhood Friend, the best of the seven or eight Christopher Moore's I read this year, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, which might be the first book I've ever immediately read through a second time after finishing it the first time (which I did back in April) (half of his Everything is Illuminated made me laugh out loud, too).
