I just finished The Virgin Suicides so its been a good transition into rereading American Gods. Eugenides is just such a mercilessly good writer, so fluid, so captivatingly bland and yet surreal to become as ordinarily out of the ordinary like a mushroom trip. Not overpowering like acid, not a subtle enlightenment like DMT, but the perfectly syncretic blend. Only Gabriel Garcia-Marquez does this better, and even he could take some lessons from the Virgin Suicides, though I just couldn't get into Middlesex even as superbly written as it was. There is a new one I'm lazily seeking..
Only Patrick Suskind speaks to me more deeply, and only Clive Barker lures me more. With American Gods, I enjoyed it the first time, but I think this second time and at this junction in my life I am appreciating it better. Lately I've been feeling evaporative, which I am starting to understand weirdly as a good thing, but its kind of a readjustment to be existentially evanescent. So I am getting this novel a bitter more intuitively then the first time through. I find it visual, subtle, coy. The motifs slowly unveil themselves but only so slightly as if being shy..