This is another book I didn’t read all in one day (cf. War and Peace). I have been dipping into it all week, slowly absorbing the pastoral splendour of this classic and beloved novel, and discovering why it has stood the test of time — not to mention appearing on a million high school English tests.
There is a lot going on in the town of Middlemarch, and a lot of it has to do with politics that I simply did not understand and had to go research. What was the Reform Bill? What were Reformers? Did it have something to do with church?
No, it turns out it changed the laws regarding who could stand for parliament and how, and also gave more people the right to vote. (Not women though, obviously. That would have been crazy.) How that affects this story is that many of its central figures are either pro- or anti-Reform, and somehow that all ties into how they are able to run a charity hospital in the town. I think?
Of much more interest to me were the romances offered up by this epic, none of the objects of affection truly worthy — except, perhaps, for the lovely Mary, who nevertheless ends up with the wrong man — but all of them very real, and interesting, and infuriating in turn.
I was particularly taken with the story of Dorothea — prim, saintly, often insufferable Dorothea — and her devoted swain, and relation by marriage, Will Ladislaw, who is forbidden from pursuing her after her widowhood by a particularly nasty condition in her deceased husband’s will. The restraint with which the two lovers carefully don not say things to each other is captivating, as is their tendency to measure everything through the lens of the other, and their quickness to take offense or read into perfectly innocent encounters with others.
For the rest, the steady reform of profligate youngster Fred Vincy is a pleasure, and the comeuppance delivered to one particularly venal bastion of the community is deeply satisfying, and there are moments of dry, almost fourth-wall-breaking wit that raise a chuckle along with the requisite confusion that the author’s belief that you know exactly what is going on in the world of the time is bound to produce.
Of all the “Classics” I have read over the past years — maybe even ever, with the exception of Jane Austen’s ever-delightful output — I think that Middlemarch may very well be my favourite. I not only feel virtuous for having read it, but am genuinely glad that I did.
Who knew?
SCORECARD
TBR DAY 160: Middlemarch by George Eliot
GENRE: Classic, Pastoral, General Fiction
PUBLISHED: 1871
TIME ON THE TBR: ~15 years.
PURCHASED FROM: Op shop.
KEEP: Yes!
I hate when this happens.
Honestly, I only really know anything about Walt Whitman due to Chris in the Morning on Northern Exposure. There as an episode where the bombastic Maurice objected to Chris mentioning Whitman’s sexuality, and I remember watching that and deciding I had to find out more about this classic LGBTQI+ American poet.
Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar Saga is a stalwart of Epic Fantasy, a now 30 book-long odyssey that began with Magician, way back in 1982. I read Magician about ten years ago — long after I had already immersed myself in all kinds of Epic Fantasy, both classic and modern, heroic and grimdark — and was quite taken with its worldbuilding, its intriguing cross-dimensional societies, and its unlikely hero, the (of course) secretly powerful country lad, Pug. I read the next seven books in the series in pretty quick succession, but then I just… kind of forgot the series existed, I guess. I certainly never cared enough to seek the rest of it out.
Such a clever book! An hour at a time, from midnight to midnight, we walk in the footsteps of the denizens of Ancient Rome, from the to bath attendants to Vestal Virgins to laundry workers to lawyers to sex workers and beyond, this book gives us a very accessible taste of living history, and enables us to get inside the heads of these — fictional, but based on fact — long-dead archetypes.
Now, obviously, I didn’t read War and Peace in a single day. I’ve been reading it since January. A chapter here, a chapter there, every now and then I’d get swept up in the story and read it for an hour or two and a time. But today — oh, the glory of it, today! — I finished the thing.
I have either not previously read nearly as many Poirot novels as I had thought, or my memory is far, far worse than I fondly believe. Because this story was entirely new to me, in every particular, and since it is such an excellent one, I feel certain I would have retained, at the very least, a general feeling of goodwill towards it, and have remembered its title, had it ever actually crossed my brain.
Following yesterday’s abhorrent, indigestible trifle, I thought I’d make with the scholarship and refinement today, which led me to select this venerable work from my (diminishing, but still overflowing) TBR shelves.
I just can’t do it. I tried. Oh lord, I tried. I bought this book close upon its release, around four years ago, due to my sister Kathryn, who was in the grip of One Direction fandom (she is much, much younger than me), and I grew curious when she told me that this book began life as the world’s most read and loved 1D fanfic of all time. 
The heroine of this book is named “Angharad.” Harry, for short, of course. She is a witch who sees dead people, which comes in handy when dead people start cropping up all over the place. Soon, Harry is at the epicentre of a zombie plague, while also being pursued by her city’s powerful vampire lord and being attracted to/angered by a sexy shapeshifter cop.