welcome to...MIDDLEMARCH MARCH. this book is a calm cool and collected 880 pages long, so elle and i will be tackling three chapters a day...every day for this whole month.join us as we melt our minds. i love a project!DAY 1: CHAPTERS 1-3immediately i am having fun. approx 30 pages per day for 31 days currently seems like the perfect way to read a book, i am walking on sunshine, i am breathing rainbows or whatever.this is beautifully written and a whole blast. i'm gonna live forever.DAY 2: CHAPT...

I put off reading this for actual decades : 900 crammed pages about the well-to-do folk of an ordinary small English country town called Middlemarch. I thought it might be tweedy. Jane Austen for those who wouldn't be caught dead reading P&P. . But also I suspected it would be a masterpiece. But a very verbose one. And yes, I was right. It is, and it is. And much of this tangled story is sad – there are two terrible marriages brilliantly described and there is a great scandal. But there’s an...

I am spoiling myself with my literary discoveries!! I enjoyed George Eliot's Middlemarch again, which is nearly 1,000 pages long. It is a fantastic story about a small village in England where several locals' destinies meet, and we embark on a grand adventure from the very first page!The novel focuses on several couples: Dorothea Brooke and M.Casaubon, a boring clergyman, followed by Dorothea and Will Ladislaw, whom we follow throughout history; the unhappy marriage of Tertius Lydgate, an ambiti...

Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat...

Oh, the slow burn of genius.I always tread lightly when it comes to using the word "genius" but there is no way around it here.It took me a good 200 pages to fully get into the novel and its ornate 19th-century turn of phrase but very quickly, I was so completely spellbound by its intelligence and wisdom that I couldn't put it down.George Eliot's astonishing authorial voice is something to behold. It takes the (mis)adventures of a handful of characters and peels their layers one by one with so m...

This is the best book ever written, and why would you even think that? Who cares? It seems like a particularly male thing to do, this categorizing, this ranking. When George Eliot introduces Casaubon, a compulsive categorizer who has accomplished nothing of value, it feels like more than a character. It's a warning. She keeps quoting Eve from Paradise Lost, who was impressed by a man and look how that turned out. Eliot's talking about women following men and their dumb, arcane knowledge. Dorothe...

Page 97:Ugh. I'm trying, guys, I really am. But right now I'm about 100 pages into this book, and the thought of getting through the next 700 is making me want to throw myself under a train. And I almost never leave a book unread, so this is serious. However, since it's on The List, I feel I should at least try to give it another chance. But it's not going to be easy.Here, in simplified list form, are the reasons I really, really want to abandon this book: -It's everything I hate about Austen - ...

I'm thoroughly embarrassed to admit that this book was first recommended to me by my stalker. Subsequently, I avoided MIDDLEMARCH like the plague, because it became associated with this creepy guy who thought the fastest way to my heart was to stare at me, follow me home, and leave obscene messages on my voice mail. Flash forward 2 years, when I'm purusing yet another of my favorite tomes, THE BOOK OF LISTS. I'm intrigued to see that the one book that consistently turns up on the "Ten Favorite N...

Best. Goddamned. Book. Ever.

Seriously, this shit's bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. 750 pages in, and you're still being surprised. It's 800 pages long and EVERY SINGLE PAGE ADVANCES THE PLOT. You cannot believe it until you read it.

This is a writer's book. By which I mean, and I say this with love, that if you write, but you do not love Middlemarch with everything that's in you, then stop writing. Yesterday.

3.75