Book review for week 52

Hi. So. Just finished reading this book from 1920 called The Age of Innocence by this lady Edith Wharton, an American writer living in Paris at the time, pretty much like everybody else in the Lost Generation. One would think their being like the Superfriends or something, like you got Ernest Hemingway as Superman with a moustache and... naww. Scratch that.

Anyway. Some cool, cool book that one. Set in a 1870s New York and focusing on the upper echelons of the NY society, it uses a plot regarding the forbidden romance between a respected & respectable married man from the local elite to a woman with a questionable past, recently arrived from Europe, to convey that whole fin-de-siècle atmosphere: the changing of the times and values toward our modern conception of world.
The protagonist per se is himself a lynchpin of the customs and morals of a rigid and claustrophobic society bound by their own rules (more like tribal rituals and ancient, atavistic mores), and is thus faced with a gripping choice: Is one capable of placing his personal life & love above his duties to his peers?
Incredibly enough... the book is not boring and the story really flows! The narrative is easy and detailed enough to visually immerse the reader straight into it, but with none of that anal-retentive Tolkien stuff. It is actually like watching the birth of the 20th century...
Apropos of that, I think this book has one of the best last chapters I´ve ever read (second only to Jack Kerouac´s Maggie Cassidy); I love last chapters & outcomes, and the last chapter in The Age of Innocence crystallizes pretty much everything that´s come before.
The book won a Pulitzer prize in 1920, and was made into a movie with Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder and Michelle Pfeiffer some fifteen years ago (which I haven´t seen. Yet. )

Will go to the bookstore today. Runners-up are 10 Days That Shook the World by John Reed, and anything with Batman on it.
I´ll let you know.

Thanks for dropping by, and off to lunch.