Rating: 
Summary: Exhausting but fascinating
Review: As I remarked several times in the time it took to read Memoirs of Cleopatra, "I'm really enjoying the book, but lugging it around is starting to be a bitch." At well over 900 pages, this is a much longer novelized biography than, say, Colin Falconer's "When We Were Gods," so if you're not really, reeeeaaalllyy interested in Cleopatra, Caesar, and Antony, you might want to skip this one.
If you are interested, however, I don't see how you could do much better than this book. From the death of her mother as a young child to her own death 30 years later, "Memoirs" recounts Cleopatra's struggles to hold onto the crown of an independent Egypt. These struggles pit her against everyone from her own siblings to the might of the Roman Empire, which she carries on a tortured love/hate relationship with in the form of her affairs with Caesar and Antony and her mutual hatred with Augustus Caesar (Octavian). Cleopatra, through her son by Caesar, has a claim on Rome, yet she wants nothing more than to free the Eastern world from its influence. This conflict provides much of the plot of the second half of the book, culminating in Cleopatra and Antony's disastrous defeat at Actium and their subsequent double suicide.
The book is filled with captivating secondary characters, most of them historical: Cleopatra's four children, her physician, her servants, various political figures in Rome, King Herod of Judea. It's these characters that give the book its life apart from the well-known story of Cleopatra, and I was impressed by the care George has shown in not allowing her story to become sensational or pitiful.
Honestly, as heavy as the book was, I thought it was worth every page.
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