Middlesex-21

I'm afraid I'm falling behind on this, it's getting harder and harder to bring myself to read these books at the same speed I used to read at when I was reading for my own enjoyment, I hope this isn't a case of some sort of reader's burnout.

Fears aside this book was better than some of the other ones I have read during my 52 book reading spree. It tells of the history of a man who is actually not a man. Due to a genetic disorder Cal, the man in question, was born and raised as Calliope, a girl.

The book tells the story of Cal/Calliope's grandparents and parents and how he/she came to be. In doing so it became apparent that society and biology run counter to each other. In nature there are no such things as brothers or sisters, just different members of the species. Which is why when Cal's grandmother and grandfather fell in love there was no barriers except those of society forbidding marriage of siblings.

If I remember correctly Cal's parents were also related, I believe they were cousins. This is also considered incest, and contributed to the genetic disorder found in Cal.

Before reading this I was aware that genetic disorders could often stem from these types of relationships, but this is certainly the first time I have heard of this particular disorder. I have heard of people surgically changing genders, but never of people changing sexes. That made the book quite interesting as I read on in search of when and how the change occurred.

The change was rather anti-climatic after my excitement, but still it made the book an interesting read. It also made me wonder if this is a real condition or not, it doesn't sound fake, and as strange as it may be I wouldn't be surprised if it were in fact real.

All in all, it was an interesting story and it was a much more enjoyable read than many of the other books thus far. So hopefully it'll be the change of pace that gets me going at normal speed again.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being-22

This book was a bit too confusing for me to extract the psychological ideas from it, the main character Thomas was said to have died at three or four points in the book. Tereza, the woman who loved Thomas and was very jealous of his many mistresses was said to have left him about a third of the way through the book, but then the rest of the book is filled with them being together. I don't remember a scene where they were reunited though.

The constant foreign words that were defined once and then assumed that they were understood for the next few hundred pages didn't help. Due to the Christmas craze of the past few weeks it took a long time to finish this book, so towards the end these foreign words were hard to cope with since I had forgotten their meanings.

With all of this I'm afraid this blog post will have to be the worst of the bunch, I really don't have anything to put in it.

The things I did gather are rather simple and uninteresting. I can only assume the author is very anti-communist, or at least anti-Stalinist. The constant events describing how communism oppressed people are representative of that. however being anti-communist and anti-Stalin are different things. Stalin was a dictator who also happened to be a communist. So the author could be against the dictatorship but not against the ideals of communism.

The author also illustrates the difference between making love and feeling love. Thomas loved Teresa, but constantly pursued other women for his baser urges. For some reason he was unable to see why this was wrong, I didn't quite understand his viewpoint though, which is probably a good thing for any future girlfriends or wives I may have in the future.

Another thing that I remember is that at one point the Author speculated a bit about how God and our waste products were related. We are disgusted by our waste products, but since we are made in God's image then he must defecate just as we do. If he does not produce the things that we find disgusting than we are not like him and the bible is wrong. If he does defecate then we must either consider our waste as not disgusting or accept that God is not a perfect being. Apparently the writers of the bible edited the text to avoid the problem.

That's just about all the philosophy I remember from the book, and even that is rather poorly remembered. So I'm going to cut my losses here and move on to the next book, hopefully it will turn out better than this one.