A quick book update

I finished The Time Traveler's Wife over the weekend while sitting in the M'boro Hastings, which has been completely gutted and renovated since the last time I was in there. What was once green and comfortably worn and dingy is now snazzy and all high-tech and shit, with bright colors and big silver letters hanging from the ceiling. The breezeway is gone and has been replaced by a patio area where you can sit and sip your coffee from the freaking bistro inside. That's right -- a freaking bistro! It's all very chic and I had no idea it had happened until I walked inside and instantly felt like I was stepping into a different time.

Anyway, about the book. The ending is bittersweet. We meet Clare and Henry again in Clare's old age. There is a great deal of calculated ambiguity in the ending. And by calculated ambiguity, I mean that we know the boundaries of what will happen (Henry will spend a brief time with the elderly Clare, and when he's gone from her present, Clare will eventually die), but we don't know what might happen within those boundaries (personally, I'm rooting for the fortysomething Henry to make love one last time to the eightysomething Clare). I got a little misty-eyed sitting there in a swanky new wingback (actually, it might not have been a wingback, but it was cozy like a wingback), sad that love is so fleeting and so finite yet so indelible that it gets into your core and changes everything about you, even when it's time to let go. And I was sad that the story was over for me and I had to move on to another book.

So I decided to move on to another book I'd heard good things about: Middlesex. And now that I've bought it, started reading it, and added it to my sidebar way down there, it makes my reading list look tarty indeed.