The Marriage Plot (by Jeffrey Eugenides)

Reading this book, I didn't know about all the David Foster Wallace controversy (to what extent is the character of Leonard based on him, and is it a mean-spirited portrayal, even if it is?) I also have not read Middlesex. So it is from a particularly ignorant point of view that I say I deeply enjoyed this novel.

Digging into it was like digging into Visit from the Goon Squad, just really good, really enjoyable literary fiction. I loved the characters, as annoying as each of then were at times. (Yes, Leonard felt most annoying of all.) I adored the ending. Just a great, juicy, enjoyable read. Is Middlesex this good? I'd better get to it.

(I really wanted to highlight or dog-ear a number of passages in the book, but I was borrowing a copy. I'll have to re-read it so I can pull out my favorite quotes.)

The Acceptance World: Book Three of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

For some reason, this volume didn't grab me as much as the first two, and thus it took me a while to finish it. I also saw some reviews (which I guess only show up on your Kindle, not on the Amazon site) talking about how Powell is clearly satirizing his friends like George Orwell and all these other people. Reading that I realized how much of the satire I'm probably missing in these books! But I'm enjoying them anyway. This one less so. Still overall, an interesting world is beginning to develop. Plus, the narrator is having a hot and heavy affair with a married woman who at one point answers the door naked. So how bad can it be?

"There is always a real and an imaginary person you are in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other."