"The Welsh Girl"

I first heard about “The Welsh Girl” on another book blog about a year ago, and it sounded like something I would like. I can’t resist historical fiction, especially books set during World War II. I finally got around to reading it earlier this month, and I was not disappointed.

The story revolves around two main characters (well, there’s a third but he was sort of peripheral to the main plot) – a German soldier captured by the British, and a teenage Welsh girl who lives with her widowed father in a small sheep-herding village. The novel follows each of them as their lives head toward an inevitable intersection when the soldier ends up in a prison camp in the girl’s town.

I thought this would end up being a traditional Romeo and Juliet type thwarted romance, but it turned out to be much more nuanced than that. Each character struggles with what it means to be home, and what freedom is. I highly recommend this book, and I think I will look for some of author’s short story collections. (The author is Peter Ho Davies, and “The Welsh Girl” is his first novel.)

"The End"

When I started reading “Then We Came to the End,” by Joshua Ferris, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew it was part of the very small genre of “workplace fiction” – would it be a literary version of “The Office”?? It turns out that while some aspects of the book are very funny (my favorite section: one character decides that for an entire day, he will respond to his coworkers only with quotes from “The Godfather”), there is also an unexpectedly poignant story at the heart of the novel. The author also pulls off the notable feat of telling the story in the collective second person.

I have always thought that people in my office were a little crazy – almost as crazy as the people in this book, but not quite. (No one in my office has gotten fired, then dressed up as a clown and returned with a paintball gun to exact revenge – not yet, anyway.) Perhaps I should start taking notes at the office – someday I could create another addition to the workplace genre...

Book without end

This weekend I had time to do a big chunk of reading and finally finished "World Without End," by Ken Follett. All 1,015 pages of it. I was very eager to read this because it's the sequel to "Pillars of the Earth," which I read in high school and really loved. The sequel was pretty good, but not as good as the original. It's set in England during the 1300s, about 200 years (I think) after "Pillars." Lots of scandal, death and disaster, as you would expect from that time period. Once this comes out in paperback, it will make a good beach read (the hardcover is so darn heavy!).

I also read a few other books during my mini blogging hiatus. The best one was "The Great Man," by Kate Christensen, which I read for my book group. Among the group it has now become known as "the book about old ladies having sex" (not with each other), but it's really much more than that :) The book explores the lives of four women with connections to a famous painter (including his wife, mistress and sister), five years after his death. I really liked the book, and it provoked a really good discussion in our book group meeting about the characters' decisions and their relationships with each other.

Another good read was "The Lobster Chronicles," by Linda Greenlaw, an Atlantic fishing boat captain who decides to see if she can make a living fishing for lobsters. I liked her descriptions of life on a (very, very) small island in Maine, especially since my grandmother lives in Maine on a (rather large) island, and I have a relative who is a lobsterfisherman. On a side note, Greenlaw also makes an appearance as a character in "The Perfect Storm" - her fishing boat was nearly caught in the storm, but she managed to get back to shore in time.

I also recently read "A Natural History of the Senses," by Diane Ackerman. That one was OK but not great. It's full of interesting bits of trivia, such as the fact that women usually have a better sense of smell than men, but it seemed a little disjointed. I tend to prefer books with more of a narrative structure.

Phew. That was a long post. It sounds like I have been reading a lot but I feel like I haven't. I always think that I should have tons of extra time to read in the summer, but it doesn't seem to be happening this year, with so much travel and other events... I have a vacation coming up next week though, and I will be bringing lots of books with me!

September in June

A full week after our book group meeting, I have finally gotten around to posting ;) This time, we read “Septembers of Shiraz,” by Dalia Sofer. Everyone enjoyed the novel, which is a somewhat autobiographical account of one Jewish family’s ordeal during and after the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Each member of the family tells his or her own part of the story – the father who was taken to prison, the wife who was left behind, the daughter who wants to fight back against the regime, and the son, cut off from his family and drifting aimlessly through New York City.

I believe this is the first novel for Sofer, whose family fled Iran when she was 10 years old. This book was very eye-opening for me, since I didn’t know very much about the Iranian Revolution. It almost seems as though it started out as more of a class struggle than a religious battle, although the religious fundamentalists eventually gained most of the power.

When we chose this book, we almost ended up picking “Persepolis,” by Marjane Satrapi, which seems to cover similar themes, but in graphic novel format. Now I definitely want to read that one as well (another one to add to the list!).

And in case you were wondering, we did drink Shiraz during the meeting ;)

Up next for the book group is “The Great Man,” by Kate Christensen.

No more!

As if I needed any more additions to my “to be read” list, I recently came across this article in the New York Times. It’s about a book with the somewhat threatening title, “1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.” Great. My own TBR list is probably already over 1,000, I don’t need anyone else telling me what to read. In case you’re wondering, I looked through the entire list, and I have read exactly 46 of these supposedly essential novels. (The list is all fiction, which puts me at a disadvantage, since I read about 50/50 fiction/non-fiction.)

There are several books that overlap with my own list, and some more that I should probably read some day (I really do need to read more Haruki Murakami). But I do not foresee myself attempting to meet this book’s challenge. I have even accepted that I’m not going to read all of the books on my own list. Speaking of which, I should get back to one of the three books I’m reading now….

"Kaaterskill Falls"

“Kaaterskill Falls,” by Allegra Goodman, is a book that draws you in very gently. The story follows a group of Orthodox Jewish families who spend summers in Kaaterskill Falls, somewhere in upstate New York. There is not a lot of action, and I didn’t think I was all that into the story, but then about halfway through I realized that I really cared what happened to these characters. I especially liked Elizabeth, a young, devout mother of five daughters who decides that she wants something more than the very traditional life she has always lived.

I picked up this book in a used bookstore a couple of years ago, after reading another of Goodman’s novels, “Intuition.” That was another gently unfolding story, with a very different setting—a high-powered cancer research institute in Cambridge, Mass. Part of the reason I liked that one so much is that I have worked in similar places, and the story and characters rang true. I wasn’t sure I would like “Kaaterskill Falls” as much as that one, but it turns out Goodman is such a good writer that she can make you care about all kinds of characters. If you go into it expecting a beautifully described slice of life, rather than an action-packed story, you will not be disappointed.

"The Omnivore's Dilemma"

When the Atkins diet became so popular, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to give up an entire food group. (Especially BREAD, which is by far my favorite food group.) Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” thinks he has the answer for why Americans are so susceptible to fad diets.

The problem, he says, is that America has never had a stable national cuisine. Our traditions are so skimpy that any crackpot with a new diet plan can win legions of converts (and this started long before Atkins—remember the grapefruit diet?).

While other cultures choose their food based on taste and tradition, Americans rely on “experts” to tell them what foods are “good” or “bad.” This only feeds the national anxiety (the omnivore’s dilemma) over what to eat. When we can eat anything we want, it’s that much harder to figure out what we actually SHOULD eat.

Industrial food has seized on this anxiety and created all sorts of processed food products that supposedly add value to our diets, but really appear to just increase Big Food’s profits, at the expense of our health. Because we don’t know what real food is supposed to be, we’ll eat anything. We forget that tasteless chicken pieces breaded and fried in a variety of corn products is NOT FOOD.

In his book, Pollan traces the history of four meals — industrial (fast food), industrial organic (Whole Foods products), pastoral (from a small local farm), and a meal in which everything was hunted or gathered by the author.

It turns out that industrial food is based, to a rather shocking degree, on corn products. Not just high fructose corn syrup, but all sorts of other starches, oils, etc. Plus, most industrially raised livestock are fed on corn, a diet that cows and chickens are not designed to eat, which is why cattle must also be fed so many antibiotics. Between the antibiotics, the pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and petroleum needed to transport all this food to and from various processing facilities, it sounds like a completely unsustainable enterprise.

Which leaves us with what Pollan seems to think is the best way to eat – from a local farm, preferably one where you know the farmer or at least know a lot about how the farm is run. It turns out that old-fashioned agricultural principles like crop rotation and pasturing animals rather than force feeding them corn were actually pretty good ideas, in terms of quality of food produced and environmental health.

Reading this book made me very glad that I am a vegetarian — just think how much better off the world would be if we didn’t devote so much land to growing corn to feed livestock. Instead, farmers could grow food for people… and maybe we wouldn’t have skyrocketing food prices and food riots. Just a thought.

Extremes

I have been sadly delinquent as a blogger and reader this month, for some reason. I have only finished one book! It was a good one though: “Under the Banner of Heaven,” by Jon Krakauer, which I read for my book group.

The book is about Mormonism, specifically a breakaway group of fundamentalist Mormons who still practice polygamy. Coincidentally, this story about a compound of Fundamentalist Mormons broke while we were reading the book. I had no idea that so many Mormons were still practicing polygamy, but, as Krakauer describes it, there are several towns in the Western U.S., Canada and Mexico where there are still enclaves of polygamous Mormons.

The Mormon church officially condemns polygamy, but these fundamentalist groups say that true believer must practice it, because it was proclaimed by the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. Smith claims that he received a revelation from God saying that polygamy was an essential sacred practice, but it seems like the truth was more like he decided he wanted to sleep with women other than his first wife, especially younger women. (His first wife was not very happy about this.)

Under pressure from the U.S. government, the church outlawed polygamy in 1890, but as illustrated recently in Texas, the practice still continues. Disturbingly, many of the “wives” are barely older than 15.

Krakauer focuses on the history of the development of fundamental Mormonism. As an extreme example of such fundamentalism, he relates the story of a murder that took place in 1984. Ron Lafferty, a Mormon who had decided he wanted to practice polygamy, claimed he received a revelation from God telling him to kill his sister-in-law, Brenda Lafferty, who he felt was obstructing his efforts to expand his family.

Krakauer’s descriptions of fundamentalist Mormons reminded me of another book I read recently, “The Looming Tower,” about fundamentalist Muslims. In both religions, when taken to extremes, followers believe that not only is their brand of religion the only valid one, but non-believers, or anyone else who gets in their way, must be killed.

There are so many bizarre aspects of Mormonism, from the founding revelation of the church, delivered by an angel named in Moroni in upstate New York, to the long undergarment that all devout Mormons are supposed to wear every day. But to be fair, all major religions have elements that are really strange if you think about them at all. It’s just easier to pick apart Mormonism because it developed so recently and its history has been documented extensively.

Not surprisingly, the book was not very well received by the Mormon church. Amusingly, one day while I was reading it on the T, a young Mormon missionary (I could tell by his nametag) got on the train and sat down across from me. I tried to obscure the cover of the book, I don’t think he noticed it. Phew!

"It's not you, it's your books"

I love this essay from yesterday’s New York Times.

I have never broken up with anyone over their taste in books, though it seems like something I am capable of doing. I tend to agree with the author quoted in that essay saying, “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period.” Even better, I found a guy with pretty good taste in books—he even borrows mine sometimes ;)

Ghost stories

OK, I have finally gotten around to writing about “The Ghost Map.” :) This is another in my series of books about death and disaster, which I so enjoy reading. In this installment, the agent of destruction is the bacterium that causes cholera, and the setting is 1850s London.

I don’t think I would really have liked living during this time period. For starters, the city was overrun with sewage. It was also a place where illness and death constantly lurked, in the air you breathed, in the water you drank. And the worst of it was, people had no idea what was causing cholera or any of the other diseases that periodically broke out in the overcrowded city.

As author Steven Johnson writes:

“To live in such a world was to live with the shadow of death hovering over your shoulder at every moment. To live was to be not dead yet… As a matter of practical reality, the threat of sudden devastation—your entire extended family wiped out in a matter of days—was far more immediate than the terror threats of today.”

One London physician, John Snow, suspected that cholera was transmitted through drinking water, but his theory was sneered at by most of the medical establishment, who believed the disease was “miasmatic,” or carried in the (very stinky) air that arose from London’s overflowing sewers and cesspools.

During one outbreak in August 1854, Snow determined that the vast majority of those who fell ill had drunk water from a particular neighborhood well. Even when he presented this map to city health officials, they clung to the miasma theory, but eventually Snow was able to persuade them he was right. That realization led Londoners to built one of the most extensive sewer systems in the world and essentially eliminate cholera in the city.

In fact, the development of modern sewer systems, according to Johnson, was one of the key factors that allowed cities to develop into places that can sustain huge numbers of people.

This book is loaded with historical detail and Johnson does a good job of placing the 1854 outbreak into a broader historical context. It’s also a definite page-turner. I highly recommend it, especially if you share my taste for books about disease and disaster…

Expectations

Yesterday was an exciting day – I finished TWO books that I have been reading for a while. I’ll start with “People of the Book,” by Geraldine Brooks. I was really looking forward to reading this book because I really enjoyed all of her others. I even bought it in hardcover (though it was pretty cheap on Amazon :) ) I had high expectations, but I have to say they were only partially met.

The book is set in 1996 Sarajevo, where a book conservator named Hanna is asked to examine a very old manuscript, an illustrated haggadah (used during the Passover seder) known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. There is an actual Sarajevo Haggadah that inspired the novel, and its real history is fascinating – Geraldine Brooks also wrote a piece in The New Yorker recently about how it was saved from the Nazis by a Muslim librarian during World War II.

Anyway, back to the novel – it alternates between scenes from Hanna’s life and her study of the book, and flashbacks to critical moments in the book’s history, all the way back to its creation in the late 1400s. I would say that the book only half fulfilled my expectations because the historical chapters were very good, but the chapters that focused on Hanna seemed very unrealistic. They reminded me of “The Da Vinci Code,” but not in a good way (contrived plot twists, lame dialogue).

Both of Brooks’ earlier novels were historical fiction, and one of them won a Pulitzer Prize, so I’m hoping that she will return to that genre in her future work :)

I’ll post something soon about the other book I just read, “The Ghost Map,” by Steven Johnson. Stay tuned…

Take your broke rack home

I have never really liked Scrabble. But for some reason, when you put it online and give it a catchy new name, I become addicted to it. I refer of course to Scrabulous, the most excellent time-waster I have ever seen. I am really not very good at it, but I usually have at least five games going at once. (I have to draw the line at playing at work though – I would never get anything done!)

Inspired by my new addiction, I decided to finally read a book that I bought a few months ago but hadn’t gotten around to yet – “Word Freak,” by Stefan Fatsis. The author is a Wall Street Journal reporter who decided to devote a year to Scrabble to see if he could become an expert level player.

Fatsis started hanging out with several of the best Scrabble players in the U.S., a motley collection of mostly unemployed, unsocialized young men who spend all of their time memorizing word lists and quizzing each other on anagrams. At first he is somewhat disdainful of all the time they spend on Scrabble, but soon enough he becomes sucked into the crazed world of competitive Scrabble.

These people are not joking around – it’s not unusual to see words like SUQ, ZINCOID, LIAISES and ACAROID appear on the board. Players compile and study lists of the letter combinations most likely to produce bingos (which use all 7 letters on your rack), lists of two letter words, lists of words that include BOAT, etc, etc.

An aside: My most glorious Scrabulous moment so far involves making ZANY with a triple-word score, with the Y hooked onto JAUNT to form JAUNTY. That totaled about 80 points, which is nothing compared to the moves that the elite players make all the time.

Fatsis profiles many of the major players and delves into the history of Scrabble as he relates his personal quest to reach the expert level. The game was invented by architect Alfred Butts in the 1930s and eventually bought by Hasbro (Mattel owns the international rights). Both companies have been making quite a fuss over the huge popularity of Scrabulous and are threatening to shut it down. In my opinion, that would just alienate all of the new Scrabble fans (like me!), which seems like a marketing fiasco. Hopefully they can come up with some kind of agreement… I’m optimistic that it hasn’t been shut down yet :)

Btw the title of this post comes from this fantastic song, “Scrabulous,” a parody of “Glamorous,” passed on to me by Mimi37 (who always beats me at Scrabulous! Grrrr). My favorite line: “If you ain’t got no vowels take your broke rack home.”

"The Penelopiad"

This month’s book group selection was short but entertaining: “The Penelopiad,” by Margaret Atwood. It’s part of a series in which well-known authors retell famous myths – in this case, the story of Odysseus’ wife, Penelope.

I thought Atwood did a nice job of shedding more light on what was going on at Odysseus’ palace while he was off gallivanting with sirens, goddesses, etc., leaving his wife to the mercy of the gluttonous suitors. In the book’s introduction, Atwood writes that she has always been curious about the lives of the 12 maids whom Odysseus hanged upon his return, ostensibly because they were sleeping with the suitors. In Atwood’s retelling, the story is much more complicated and ambiguous. The maids and Penelope offer differing versions of events, leaving the reader to wonder who is the more reliable narrator.

Most of us agreed that while the novel was insightful and fun to read, Atwood could have gone much deeper into the subject. The book weighs in at less than 200 pages, though it seems like brevity is one of the intended features of the series, according to this article.

For our next book group selection, we decided to branch into non-fiction and will be reading “Under the Banner of Heaven,” by Jon Krakauer. It’s about Mormons, specifically some of the more radical sects. I loved his book about climbing Mount Everest, “Into Thin Air,” so I am looking forward to this one.

Miracle

There are some books that are not only great reads, but can also change the way you live. One such book is “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” by Barbara Kingsolver, which I finished last weekend.

Kingsolver and her family decided to spend a year eating only food that they grew themselves or was grown/produced locally. They had many reasons to try this experiment, chiefly their horror at realizing the “carbon footprint” of the food that most Americans eat: We consume 400 gallons of oil a year per citizen for agricultural use, and each item in a typical American meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles from farm to plate.

Another reason for going local? Food simply tastes better when it is fresh and in season, Kingsolver says, and I couldn’t agree more. There is nothing worse than the mealy tomatoes currently available in Boston supermarkets, and I would never dare to buy peaches or strawberries in February – who knows how long it has taken them to get to my neighborhood grocery store?

The experiment turned out well for Kingsolver – she and her family were able to grow most of the vegetables they needed, raised chickens and turkeys, made bread and cheese, and obtained most of their other food from other farmers in their Virginia county. By canning and otherwise preserving food, they had plenty to eat when winter rolled around. No one broke down and went to the grocery store for Twinkies and Jello (at least not that they admitted).

Reading about this “locavore” experiment, which has now become a minor movement, has inspired me to try to adopt some of Kingsolver’s ideas. Of course I live in an apartment in an urban area, so I will not be growing my own food, though I do want to try growing some basil in my window :) However, I did just sign up for a program that delivers fresh produce from local farms to drop off points in Boston and Cambridge. It starts in June, and I can’t wait!

Meanwhile, my friends Catherine and Andrew, who live in California, are doing their own local food experiment. They buy local produce and other foods, make their own bread and pasta, and have even learned how to can vegetables. I am completely inspired by them. They are keeping a blog to document their efforts, check it out!

Beach reading

While packing for my recent trip to St. Thomas (destination wedding, woo hoo!), I decided I needed a good beach book. For me, a good beach book is not a trashy Danielle Steele, rather something that is light and engrossing but also requires a little bit of intellectual engagement. I decided on “In the Company of the Courtesan,” by Sarah Dunant, which ended up being a very good beach (and poolside) read.

Part of the reason I liked this book so much is that it is set in one of my favorite cities, Venice. It’s one of those places that you hear so much about it, you think it can’t possibly be as beautiful as everyone says. Then you get there and realize it really is. The book is set during the 1520s, and focuses on the life of a courtesan (basically a high-class prostitute) and her companion dwarf.

At the time, Venice was one of the most powerful cities in Europe, a leader in commerce and art. It was also known for its beautiful courtesans, whose clients included leaders of government and religion. Dunant paints a vivid portrait of the lives of Venetians: the intrigue and scandal, set against the beautiful backdrop of the watery city. The book is full of interesting characters, from high-class nobles to a famous artist and a mysterious healer/witch.

This is probably one of the best historical novels I have read, along with one of Dunant’s earlier novels, “The Birth of Venus,” which is also set in Italy (Florence).

More disaster

There is no way I could resist a book with this blurb from the NY Times on the cover: "A classic disaster tale." The book is "The Worst Hard Time," by Timothy Egan, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction last year. The disaster in question is the Dust Bowl, which transformed the American prairie from fertile farmland into a living nightmare during the 1930s.

I had heard of the Dust Bowl, of course, but until I read this book I really didn't know quite what it was. I thought it was just a really bad drought. Well, it was much, much worse. Egan relates the long history leading up to the natural disaster:

The prairies of Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle were originally populated by tall grasses, bison and Native Americans. The land was perfect for growing grasses, but not much else. Then, after the U.S. government decided to remove both bison and Native Americans, settlers were encouraged to rip up the grass, build homesteads and plant wheat. This worked out pretty well for a few years, until wheat prices bottomed out during the Depression, and more and more grassland was dug up by farmers desperate to break even. Well, it turns out the soil is not so fertile once you take away the grass that is literally holding it in place. Wind storms, which had always been common in the prairie, started picking up the dirt and carrying it in massive storms that could blot out the sun for hours at a time.



For years, people who lived in the Dust Bowl endured these dust storms, several per month. Livestock died from swallowing so much dirt, and it wasn't very healthy for humans either. The worst of the storms traveled all the way to the East Coast, coating New York and Washington DC in prairie dirt.

Naturally many people decided to leave the plains, but it was hard to find another place where they would be welcome. Many others decided to stick it out, either because they loved the land too much or had no other place to go. Egan follows several families through their Dust Bowl experiences, which really makes the story come to life. I highly recommend this book—it illuminates a part of American history that most people probably don't know very much about.

I know I have not posted in a while, but I HAVE been reading :) I just finished a novel that I will blog about soon...

18-0

So, the Patriots are going to the Super Bowl, again. Sports fans in New England are really in danger of getting spoiled, what with the Patriots, Red Sox and even Celtics having so much success. During most of the games this season, I always felt that victory was assured, even when the Pats were down in the fourth quarter. You just know that they will always come back. I’m trying hard not to take this for granted and become one of those annoying, entitled fans—I just need to think back to the early '90s when their usual record was 1-15 or 2-14, not 18-0.

Anyway, to get myself ready for the playoff run, instead of watching a lot of TV hype, I read David Halberstam’s book on Patriots coach Bill Belichick, “The Education of a Coach.” It was pretty interesting to see how Belichick became the somewhat mysterious figure he is now: brilliant defensive coach, grim workaholic, uncharismatic hater of the media, icon of unfashionable sideline wear.

As the son of a longtime assistant coach at Army, Belichick started analyzing game film around age 9. When he entered the NFL as a coach, he felt he had to work harder than anyone else to prove he belonged, since he never played in the NFL and went to college at Wesleyan, not exactly a football powerhouse. He spent long days and nights studying film and was generally considered, even early in his career, to be one of the best at breaking down a game and figuring out how to stop other teams.

Belichick later tried to instill that same work ethic in his players. To him, being the one of the best players on the team also means that you work the hardest, not relax because you’ve reached the top. That, to me, that is the most impressive aspect of Belichick’s amazing run—he has somehow convinced players who are among the best at their positions to subordinate their egos to what is best for the team. He even gets them to believe they are underdogs, a ludicrous proposition.

The book was written after the 2005 season, so it doesn’t make any mention of the recent scandals that have plagued Belichick—the “Spygate” incident, where the team was caught videotaping the Jets’ defensive signals, the ongoing hostility with Eric Mangini, former Patriots assistant and head coach of the Jets, running up the score against terrible teams, and the bizarre tabloid allegations of “wife-stealing.”

In spite of all this recent dirt, Belichick seems to have gotten pretty much a free pass from the New England fans and media (a little less so from the rest of the country, who now revile New England with the kind of venom formerly reserved for the New York Yankees and Dallas Cowboys). This just goes to show the accuracy of one of Halberstam’s assessments of life in the NFL, which goes something like “as long as you win, people don't care what else you do."

Myths

My book group met last week to talk about "The Myth of You and Me," by Leah Stewart. Compared to the other two books we have read, this was kind of a disappointment. It's the story of two women who were best friends in high school and college, until something happens (exactly what is not revealed until the end) to end the friendship. Several years later, one of them reaches out to try to repair things. The book follows two plot lines: Will they reunite, and what drove them apart in the first place? The book was well-written enough to keep my attention as events unfolded, but there was not much originality to the story. (Turns out one of them slept with the other's boyfriend—yawn.) Anyway, it was an OK book, but I wouldn't recommend it very enthusiastically.

Our next book will be about myths of a different kind—Greek myths. We are reading "The Penelopiad," by Margaret Atwood, a retelling of the Odyssey from the point of view of Odysseus' wife, Penelope. Hopefully I will like that one better :)

Wow

I just sat down and tried to write something about “Middlesex,” but words are failing me. I stayed home sick today and blasted through the last 200 pages of it, and I feel like I have just returned from immersion in another world. So mesmerizing, so original. It touches on so many interesting subjects (immigration, race relations, Prohibition), woven into a multi-generational story of a Greek-American family. The story is narrated by Calliope/Cal, who was raised as a girl but discovered at age 14 that she was genetically male. Sounds weird, but I promise you, it is worth reading.