Category Archives: Books

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex

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Middlesex Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Middlesex is a fictional novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. It is essentially an autobiography of Cal Stephanides, born Calliope Stephanides; that is, it is a tale of his birth and raising as a female, and then rebirth as a male. It is broken up into 4 “books” (and believe me, being the longest thing I’ve read in a long time, it felt like 4 books) in which his story is told.

The story opens with a history of Cal’s grandparents (a brother-sister coupling) and their upbringing in Europe. It follows with his parents (a cousin-cousin coupling) and their lives. And finally, near what felt like the end of the book, it gets onto the life of Cal. Although Cal is both the narrator and the protagonist, I felt that his spotlight in the novel was short, and was expecting more details to be shared from his later life. I also didn’t like how all the incestuous pairings were presented as the prelude to the birth of this technically intersex individual; I’m hoping this correlation (fictional and N=1) doesn’t translate into the beliefs of people in the real world. Overall though, I did enjoy the plot of the novel.

In terms of how the story was told, Eugenides painted the story beautifully. The whole time I was reading the novel, it felt as if I was watching a movie. His illustrating of each scene panned out as if it were a movie, and it made the book out to be quite an easy read (despite its epic length).

The characters were definitely interesting, and well-developed despite coming from very different lifestyles and time periods. I had issues buying everything in many of the characters, but some of their situations made it sort of difficult to completely imagine.

Overall, I enjoyed reading Eugenides’ Middlesex. Although I found it to be somewhat lengthy, I found the plot to be enjoyable, the characters to be well-developed, and the style to carry the reader through three generations of humanity across two continents.

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Music is so…amaz…actually no it comes and goes

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Ever hear a song that makes you want to get up and dance? or seems to just portray your current mood so well? It’s a wonderful feeling, but how about when you want to skip pretty much all the songs being played? When you’re at that point, music kind of sucks. Cleaning out that music list seems like a good idea, but then that’s a bit of work so you can’t really be bothered to. Plus, maybe you’ll grow nostalgic towards an old song when you hear it again a few weeks down the road! So we tell ourselves anyway. The best thing is probably to clear out the songs one at a time. That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing fairly recently when I have my songs on shuffle on iTunes. Each time I hear a song I don’t quite like anymore, the delete option is not too far off.

It’s hard to work in a subject where you lack interest. That’s how it is for most people and a lot of people (not all) are still able to work pretty hard in subjects that aren’t interesting anyway. This year I can’t seem to do that. I find it increasingly difficult to pay attention in class and work hard. It’s strange, my first and second years were probably much more busy and chaotic than my third year is now. I dropped many things to concentrate on school and I ended up doing much worse than when I had absolutely no time to study. I have more time to study now and yet…studying is the hardest action to do. I find a very limited number of things that are mentally stimulating. My camera has seen little use these days, blogging is infrequent (if not nonexistent), questioning of myself is frequent, slight aversions towards the internet are abound, and the turning to books (not school related of course) as a source of comfort. Maybe I’ll try and do some book reviews in the future…

As for the music, I’m probably just gravitating towards a different style. What it is I don’t know just yet. Keeping posts short and simple for now.

Here’s a pigeon.

Harry and the Gang Ends 8 Films with a Whimper

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As a die-hard Harry Potter fan, I went into the movie theatre 10 years ago to see the first film adaptation with scepticism. Like most fans, this feeling was purely that the film would not live up to my expectations, that something would be missing or changed which is blasphemy, and that the actress portraying Hermione Granger wouldn’t be cute enough. I walked out of the film a satisfied fan because the first film was almost scene-by-scene the book, almost nothing was changed or missing, and Emma Watson was cute and adorable.

One of the only reasons I continued to pay to watch mediocre sequels.

Over the years, my expectations that someone could fit 500-700 pages into a 2-hour movie without butchering the book went down and I let some things go without much criticism. And then I saw the trailer for the seventh film part deux. I was blown away by how awesome it was. The pace was fast, the scenes moving, and Mrs. Weasley fought like she meant to kill. After seeing the trailer a dozen times, I set a date and prepared to see the final film of the series in IMAX to end the series in style.

Boy, did that money go down the drain.

To get you up to speed: Harry, Ron, and Hermione are out to destroy several magical objects called Horcruxes so that they canfinally defeat the Dark Lord/He Who Must Not Be Named/Lord Voldemort. Thing is, they only have hunches of where and what these darn things are so they’re running around a bank (Gringrotts) and a school (Hogwarts) while trying to escape from everything that’s trying to kill them (a dragon, Death Eaters, Lord Voldemort, giants, etc).

“Why do I need glasses when I know magic?!?”

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 didn’t live up to the hype nor to how the trailer portrayed the film, the latter of which should have been obvious but I didn’t want to believe it. All the big scenes were covered by the film, even the moan-worthy 19 years later scene, but nothing was particularly memorable or rewatchable. 3D simply meant that the characters appeared to be 3 inches closer to my face, the pace was fluctuated between slow and slower, even the Battle of Hogwarts scenes, and none of the supporting actors could get anything more than 1 line or said something for cheap laughs which I didn’t laugh at. By the end I only felt a sense of relief that the movie wasn’t longer and agony that I spent $19 for a movie.

That being said,  I wouldn’t completely stay away from the film. Additional elements in the Battle of Hogwarts that weren’t in the book were fine by me, everything looked beautiful and Mrs. Weasley said her fan-famous PG 13 line. All in all, the franchise comes to a satisfactory end and thank-god the cast was perfect, save for Ginny Weasley. But hey, if JK Rowling supposedly says it’s awesome, who am I to judge?