Good Reads: Middlesex and Chasing Darkness

After a dry spell in the reading department, I just finished two terrific books that could hardly be more different. A few words about each:

Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize for literature, which means (a) I was late to the game as usual, and (b) I was predisposed to believe it would be overwritten, pretentious and deadly serious. Instead I found myself immersed in the book almost immediately. Eugenides writes beautifully, of course, but his genius is the way he draws you into his characters' experience with a series of deftly staged and deeply interconnected story arcs. The story is nominally of a family of Greek immigrants who come to Detroit early in the 20th century, and how generations of inbreeding bring about the novel's unique narrator, the intersex wunderkind Cal, nee Calliope, who lives her childhood as a girl and his adulthood as a man. Reflections on the immigrant experience, the nature of sexuality and identity, and all sorts of other fascinating ideas emerge through Cal's witty, self-aware and ultimately deeply wise observations. A "great book" that earns the label.

Robert Crais started out as more or less just another detective novelist searching for a niche. There are plenty of those; the difference with Crais is that he's found it and is busily mining it for one great story after another. His prose is rather clipped and direct in the Raymond Chandler - Robert Parker school, but over the course of ten novels featuring LA private detective Elvis Cole he has brought such rich three-dimensionality to Cole and his supporting cast that every page sings with wonderful character bits. To top it off, Crais' plots are better than ever, as evidenced by Chasing Darkness, which starts out with Cole guilt-ridden for having provided evidence clearing a man whose later suicide suggests he was a serial killer. Cole's driven search for redemption takes some terrific twists as he discovers that just about everything he thinks he knows about the case and those involved with it is false.

Enjoy...