On Chesil Beach

I just finished reading On Chesil Beach. (I don't know how to accentuate book names so I'm italicizing. Forgive me if I'm wrong. I feel like it should be underlined but that looks dumb.) It's a short novel by Ian McEwan (of Atonement fame). It was on the NYTimes list of 100 greatest books in 2007, so I picked it up on my last trip to the library. Of course I haven't finished reading any of the books I checked out, but when I went to renew them online I realized someone else requested OCB and I can't renew it! So it's due back Thursday. Today is Tuesday. Guess what I did over lunch? Read OCB. It's that short.

It's really quite good. I read Atonement and saw the movie but I never really got the hype. Obviously McEwan is a great writer but it wasn't really my cup of tea. There was too much of modern lit in there for me to fully appreciate it. I can't stand all the sacky, emotional, whiny crap that goes into most modern fiction. (By sacky I mean balls and their apparatus/containers.) But I really enjoyed OCB. Maybe it's because it's about sex, maybe it's because it's short, or maybe it's because it's good. I'm not sure. Either way, I highly recommend it if you're into two virgins doing it for the very first time on their wedding night, a night which ends very disastrously due to the above description.

It just goes to prove that you really should do it for the first time in high school when everything is awkward to begin with. It saves everyone a lot of trouble.