Archives for posts with tag: Jeffrey Eugenides

Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

a mount called Olympus

Nationality: American

Year Published: 2002

On This List Because: Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003

Primary Location: Detroit, MI

Secondary Locations: Bithynios, Asia Minor

Smyrna, Asia Minor

San Francisco, CA

New York, NY

Edition I Read: Paperback, after it had won the Pulitzer, but not the Oprah edition. The cover with people looking out from a boat, and Detroit upside down in red below. I got it from the library.

First Sentence: I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

Sexiness

I found this to be a super sexy book. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am in love with Desdemona Stephanides, who spends half the book as an old woman. I read most of this book in the lineups for TIFF, and was scared that people would realize I was reading about an incestuous marriage including a woman I was in love with because of her dark braids and shapely figure. Also sexy: young Calliope’s crush on the Obscure Object, who smoked and brushed her teeth at the same time. And the Clarinet vibrations that Milt administered to Tess. I felt like a middle-aged woman reading a romance novel.

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This is a photo from Desdemona's Facebook page. I hope she accepts my friend request.

Enjoying the book immensely so far, mostly because I am in love with Desdemona Stephanides. She had me when she was young and braided and bosomly and incestuous, and she still has me with the dentures and the religion and the hysterics.

The 3 options for book 3, following Vernon God Little, were as follows:

1,2 = East = Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize 2003

3,4 = South = The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, Booker Prize 2004

5,6 = West = J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize Winner 2003

I rolled a 2, so I will be reading Middlesex next after Vernon God Little. Sources tell me it is an excellent book.

Review for Vernon God Little is upcoming.

In between Life of Pi and Vernon God Little I read the following:

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