2009 wasn’t a year for books for me – despite an extensive collection that, with my move to New York, I had to leave behind in Boulder. I read a bunch of books for work and, while they were great books that definitely taught me some stuff, I feel weird putting them in a category I can rate (No offense Chris Brogan, Tamar Weinberg, and all the other friends that wrote books this year!)

The one book I do remember reading – and flying through – was Jeffrey Eugenides’ Virgin Suicides. Sometime earlier this year, I became obsessed with the soundtrack from the movie Virgin Suicides which was done by the band Air. It was beautiful and compelling and became a large part of my morning ritual. The last track on the score was a song called “Suicides Underground” which took excerpts from the movie and thrust them into a powerful audio landscape. When I learned that Sophia Coppola used actual excerpts from the book for the narrative of the movie, I decided I needed to read the book. I checked it out of the library and read the novel in less than 20 hours.

The book is the kind of book that I would want to write. It’s prose is simple but powerful. It’s descriptive nature tugs at the emotive nature of language without feeling forced. Eugenides’ first novel is almost perfect – taking a complex voice (it’s narrative by a “group”) and telling an emotional story of youth, love, and the way the world was slowly changing.

In the end, it’s a simple book worth reading. For me, the ending is so powerful – so I’ll include an excerpt from that here that I hope summarizes the book as a whole. Enjoy:

“It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”