This is the one I was thinking of; I don't think we ever used it for discussion, but more to just help find each other on there. I had completely forgotten that I had started it.

Yeah, it is really good. It's been like 3 1/2 years since I read it last, too, but I am shocked by how much I remember (this is my third read-through). We're doing a lot with dichotomies in class, and also thinking about the mutated gene as a character in the story. So far, it's going pretty well, except my students are doing a lot better with reading passages than they are with direct questions--like, when we read a passage and I ask, "What's going on here?" they have insightful stuff, but when I say, "What role do you think Jimmy Zizmo plays in the story?" I get mostly silence.

I read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline with my students quite frequently, and inevitably, in nearly every class, someone will raise their hand and ask: "The quotes on the back cover say this book is one of the funniest things out there; is it really supposed to be funny?" I'm on board with Joey that there are very few "lol" moments in Saunders' work--there are some, and they are very good, but his humor is very, very dark. Nearly every story that I love dearly is Sisyphean in nature, and Saunders is able to rope you into these sad, depressing, anxious narratives and make you nod along while saying, "I've been there, buddy" (even if you're not a 400-pound man who kills raccoons for a living, or if you're not a human lawn ornament); but you've got to nod along and laugh a little, or otherwise these stories would be fucking terrifying. Saunders is able to mine these scenarios for brief moments of love, sacrifice, and selflessness, and that anti-cynicism (I am not so sure if I'd go as far as to call it "optimism," but it's close) is fucking refreshing when so much contemporary literature is depressing and cynical.

I wanted to write about Saunders in my dissertation, but politically it didn't make much sense. Will probably look at him more closely when all of that is over.

Gotta admit, I was disappointed in Middlesex.

Por que?

American Gods was pretty good. I'll have to watch the show now.

I joined.

I feel like it didn't really start until 2/3s of the way in. I was most interested in the development of Callie; not the historical fiction of 1960s Detroit. I get that you needed to explain her/his genetic history but it didn't need to take that long. I was more interested in the identify issues Callie would be facing for the rest of her/his life.

I'll now patiently wait for you to explain how I missed the whole point.

I'm on there.

I don't think you missed any points at all, my good man. I totally agree that Cal's story is the real meat of the narrative, and that the Turkey/Detroit sections at the beginning are really just there to emphasize the destiny/genes thread running through the whole novel (and to get the whole metaphor of "thread" for the silk stuff) and to set up the importance of/arbitrary nature of dichotomies. Reading it again, though (I'm about 150 pages in), I'm noticing a lot more interesting connections that really fill out the narrative or just make it more multi-dimensional. One case in point: I've always read over the sections about Cal's grandfather's experiences on the Ford assembly line as just some tossed-in Marxist theory, but it struck me this time as a nice way to give these two a connection that they didn't get a chance to build when they were both alive (since they never spoke, due to Lefty's condition): just as Lefty became alienated from his labor on the assembly line, Cal eventually comes to feel alienated from his own body--everyone wants to study, prod, and examine "it," not "him," and the alienation feels quite similar. I'm on the lookout for more stuff like this as I go through.

Cal's story pre-discovery of his condition is also much stronger than his story post-discovery, IMO. The narrative voice is fully aware of how things are going to turn out, so it's not like the revelation for him is a shocking moment for us, and it allows moments and scenes like his first few sexual experiences to carry a double layer even when "Callie" isn't aware of it. I also think the racial/religious/cultural politics of the novel are more well-developed than people give it credit for.

Yeah, objectively I can really appreciate what he did. But I guess it's like Wes Anderson movies for me; I know I'm supposed to like it, I just ... don't. (I know, I know. Take it to the unpopular opinions thread.)

So when I say "disappointed," it's because his other two famous novels, neither of which did I technically finish, I had really liked. But the voice in Middlesex seemed different somehow. The prose almost, I don't know, dry?

I think that might have to do with the narration. Right before we read this, we read a story by Junot Diaz called "Negocios," in which the narrator tells the story of his father's immigration to the US from the Dominican Republic in the 1970s. In the other stories he appears in, the father is painted as almost a cartoon-character version of an abuser--he hits his kids, cheats on his wife, and psychologically abuses his own family. But in "Negocios" we watch him struggle from the bottom, working 20-hour days and sleeping on roach-infested mattresses as he tries to carve out a better life for his family. The narrator, his son, remains indifferent and distant for most of the narrative--one reason why is certainly because he wasn't there, and he's piecing together the story from a number of narratives, but on the other hand he's also having trouble processing the fact that the gigantic asshole he knows as his father was also, at some point, a young man just trying to get by in the world. Cal is going through a similar thing in Middlesex, I think, but almost in reverse: he's always loved his grandparents for just being his grandparents, but when he learns the deep, dark family secret from his grandmother, he's got to process the fact that they committed an extremely selfish act that put all of their children and grandchildren in jeopardy, that all of his suffering was a result of them putting themselves first, so his re-telling of the family history has to have that distance that we don't see in his own part of the story. I'm not trying to convince you to like it or not--I just like trying to figure out exactly why a text had a certain effect!

I need to re-read The Marriage Plot, because I remember not being a huge fan of it. The Virgin Suicides was fine.

Dinner dinner wife wife thank you thank you

Does the horse die? 'Coz if it does, I don't want to read it.

I'm sure the horse is just a metaphor or some shit.

No, there's a literal horse

And?