Currently reading
Madame Bovary
Siddhartha
Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (Collected Essays)
The Children Star
Manstealing for Fat Girls
Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New
Radio Crackling, Radio Gone
Radiant Days
Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction
Footnotes in Gaza
The Marriage Plot: A Novel
First off, I really hated MIDDLESEX (horrifyingly binary ideas about gender, location of intersex bodies' origin in incest, etc), so I was predisposed to dislike THE MARRIAGE PLOT.I read it anyway because I love Barthes' A LOVER'S DISCOURSE and because the novel sounded like it might be critical in an interesting way of the elite liberal arts college industrial complex, or at least a fun romp through a cultural moment. But no.Again I found Eugenides basic worldview repellant, uninteresting, and badly observed. I don't trust his depiction of straight women and am bored by his depiction of straight men. The story is about a heterosexual love triangle and the woman operates pretty exclusively as an object to bring the men together (I'm thinking of Sedgwick's BETWEEN MEN here). On a very basic level, this novel doesn't pass the Bechdel test. And there's weird class stuff, all this unexamined privilege. I just really dislike and distrust Eugenides's authorial worldview and I also didn't think it was particularly well-written or plotted. I mean, the writing was *fine* but really not special to me.
