{"id":1701,"date":"2011-10-21T20:36:25","date_gmt":"2011-10-21T20:36:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/?p=1701"},"modified":"2011-10-21T20:36:25","modified_gmt":"2011-10-21T20:36:25","slug":"book-log-middlesex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/?p=1701","title":{"rendered":"Book Log – Middlesex"},"content":{"rendered":"

Middlesex<\/em> by Jeffrey Euginides<\/p>\n

From Wikipedia:<\/p>\n

The Bildungsroman is a term coined in literary criticism, which purportedly defines a genre of the novel which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood, and in which character change is thus extremely important.<\/p>\n

So I learned, or re-learned (as it seems vaguely familiar), that term today.<\/p>\n

Middlesex<\/em> sat on my To Be Read shelf for an embarrassingly long amount of time.\u00a0 It languished amongst intimidating non-fiction-books-that-seemed-like-a-good-idea-to-buy-at-the-time, like Evolution’s Rainbow<\/em> and The User’s Guide to the Brain<\/em>.\u00a0 Someone, somewhere had recommended it, and it came up on paperbackswap.com, so I snagged it.\u00a0 A long time ago.<\/p>\n

I didn’t really know what it was about; I had a vague sense that it had to do with a hermaphrodite.\u00a0 I am pretty indifferent about learning about hermaphroditism, and thus I never buckled down to tackle this one.<\/p>\n

But… then I saw that John Allison (Scary Go Round<\/em>, Bad Machinery<\/em>) listed it as one of his three favorite books.\u00a0 He knows good stuff, I think.<\/p>\n

And he’s right.\u00a0 It’s a great story.\u00a0 Several great stories, actually, as we follow three generations of the main character’s family, the conceit being that we are following the path of the defective gene that leads to the main character’s status as an “intersex”.<\/p>\n

The writing is strong, the characters are rich, and I wish I’d picked it up sooner.<\/p>\n

There’s a lesson in here about selecting reading material.\u00a0 There’s a big category of topics that I personally label “meh.”\u00a0 I had zero interest in learning about geishas, but I loved Memoirs of a Geisha<\/em>.\u00a0 I need to stop caring as much what the book is about, but rather to how good it is.\u00a0 Because a good book can make you interested in anything.<\/p>\n

Probably.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Middlesex by Jeffrey Euginides From Wikipedia: The Bildungsroman is a term coined in literary criticism, which purportedly defines a genre of the novel which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood, and in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[481],"tags":[466,484],"class_list":["post-1701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-log","tag-book-log-2011","tag-eugenides"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1701"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1703,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1701\/revisions\/1703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}