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From the back cover:
Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of 1967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Calliope into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

Review:
I don’t normally go in for multi-generational family epics, and I still think the basic concept is a boring one, but in Middlesex it’s handled in such a way that it’s all leading up to some revelations made in the first paragraph and explains how they came about. About halfway in or so when I discovered I was enjoying the sprawling epic, I looked it up and found that it had won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. I think it’s well-deserved in this case.

Although I do own a paperback copy of Middlesex, I actually listened to an unabridged audio recording read by Kristoffer Tabori, who was excellent. The language is not exactly florid, but it is pretty detail-rich. It might’ve been annoying to me if I were looking at it on a page, but Tabori adopts a storyteller mien that makes all the description seem necessary to convey the proper atmosphere.

There are a few things that keep this from getting an A+, however. There are two characters who receive quirky nicknames, which can come off as just a little pretentious. When Calliope’s brother is called Chapter Eleven in the first chapter, it totally elicited a groan from me, because I generally hate books that do stuff like that. It is eventually explained, but it just seems a little look-at-me clever. Also, there’s a bit of a plot hole at the end.

So, a plain ol’ A it is. Get the unabridged audio if you can.

Man, I am hungry. I’ve been sick the past few days and haven’t really felt much like eating, but today I am ravenous. Hopefully this is a sign that things are improving. It hasn’t been an utterly debilitating variety of sick, but I’ve felt pretty listless and my stomach has been tetchy.

Some comments on recent books:

Abhorsen Trilogy by Garth Nix
I’d been curious about these books for a long time, but worried that they might be overly gothy on account of their subject matter. They turned out to be quite enjoyable. I had the good fortune to find unabridged audio versions narrated by Tim Curry. His voice for Moggett, a cat, was especially good. Sabriel is good and can function just fine as a stand-alone. Lirael, the second book, goes a little deeper into the title character’s personality and motivation, and just might be my favorite of the lot. It ends on a cliffhangery note. Abhorsen picks up precisely where Lirael left off and is just action, action, action until the very end, when things get more character driven again. I really felt like it wasn’t a book in its own right, but was just the second hunk of Lirael that got chopped off when someone decided it was too long.

I kept thinking that it might be rather dull to be physically reading this series at times, but the narration kept me entertained, and my complaints are few. Therefore, it’s recommended, but snag the audio if you can. My library had them all, and this town doesn’t even begin to be cosmopolitan, so I bet others will, too.

Daisy Miller by Henry James
What a weird little book. The moral seems rather ridiculous by today’s standards and is delivered by the sledgehammer method, making the end particularly silly. I guess I liked it alright. It was short, at least.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca rocks. There’s so much going on here I can’t really describe, but you’ve got a very cinemagraphic style of writing, a mysterious ex-wife named Rebecca, a meek and shy second wife who is occasionally very annoying, a creepy housekeeper, a moody older man, etc. If you haven’t read or seen it, you should. My main gripe is with the protagonist sometimes being very dumb (I saw one big plot twist coming miles away), but some of the other turns are genuine surprises, and just overall, the sense of suspense is finely maintained. Next on the list for me by du Maurier—Jamaica Inn. It’s the other of her novels that was made into a movie by Hitchcock. She also wrote the short story that inspired The Birds. Betcha didn’t know that!

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides: A

Pangs