- American Pastoral (Philip Roth)
- Autobiography of a Corpse (Sigizmund Krzhyzhanovsky)
- The Marriage Plot (Jeffrey Eugenides)
It wasn't planned but yet again, I found myself inside a bookstore and gave in to the by now quite alarmingly regular compulsive disorderly impulse to get some.
And within 24 hours of having acquired it, I am pleased to say that I finished The Marriage Plot (having come with high recommendations from the singular (no pun intended) Michael and Dzejla book club). The first 150 or so pages are among the funniest, most intelligent, warmest and most exquisitely plotted I've ever read in my entire reading career. Reading it proved so riveting that I surrendered with pleasure, called in sick the next day (today) and completed the entire 400 page story over the course of a lazy afternoon-evening-night marathon reading session. I'd almost forgotten the guilty, direct, immediate pleasure I still derive from reading a somewhat old fashioned novel - the one with a plot involving real humans with real stories as opposed to big-idea-books-masquerading-as-novels. (I don't remember underlining, criss-crossing, commenting so much on the margins as I've done in the first one third of the book.) Add to the above, the icing on the cake - one of the three main characters is so DFW that one would be blind to miss it - and the spell is complete. Although the book does sag from around the mid half until almost to the end, the first third is so brilliantly observed, breathtakingly beautiful, so effortlessly refreshing in its genuine humor that I don't feel like griping at all.
Bravo Jeffrey! You've restored a reader back to vigor!
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