"Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome!"

A coworker recommended Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex several weeks ago, and from the moment that I scanned the book's first page, I found myself scarcely able to put the damned thing down. I haven't been this fascinated, this absorbed by a book since I finished Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, last year.

And Middlesex has so much to offer: one of those sprawling, multigenerational family sagas I've always been drawn to; a powerful sense of history; a thoughtful treatment of gender politics--all of it woven together via a network of sexually-charged allusions to Greek mythology (Tiresius, the Minotaur, Zeus and Hera, etc).

As with many a beloved story, of course, I started having something like withdrawal pangs as soon as I got to the end.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a firm believer in endings, I respect where this novel ended. I just wish that I always had such rewarding reading to hand.