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white_hart ([personal profile] white_hart) wrote2019-01-02 11:02 am
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Reading: Middlemarch

I've been surprised, since mentioning that I planned to re-read Middlemarch over the Christmas and New Year break this year, how many people have commented to say that they disliked it and struggled to get through it. I'd only read it once before, and that was while I was at sixth form (so probably 1991, though it may have been early 1992), but I very much enjoyed it then and the only reason I haven't re-read it before now (including when I was supposed to read it at university) is because of the difficulty of finding the time to read a 900-page book through all the years when I was reading painfully slowly; it took the combination of having managed to build up my reading speed to the point where I can confidently expect to read an average-length book in a week, and having a clear fortnight with very little to prevent me reading, to feel confident enough to attempt a re-read.

Even at a distance of nearly 30 years, I was surprised how clearly some scenes and phrases had stayed with me (including a surprising number of things that I could have sworn belonged to a completely different canon), although there were other things (the whole Raffles subplot, just for starters, and Fred Vincy's choice of career) which I had completely forgotten. Eliot's wonderful moments of narrative snark, which are what appealed to me the most as a teenager, are as wonderful as I remembered them, but the adult me also saw and loved her boundless compassion for all of her characters, despite their faults and follies, and delighted in the beautifully detailed picture of a community, and the various ways in which well-meaning people can move beyond the mistakes of early adulthood to find, if not always happiness and never the life they originally envisaged, at least a degree of contentment. It's a brilliant book which absolutely deserves its reputations as one of the great classics of English literature, and I hope that it isn't another 30 years until the next time I re-read it.

[personal profile] cosmolinguist 2019-01-02 09:50 pm (UTC)(link)
I stumbled on like a ten-part omnibus Radio 4 version of Middlemarch one day when I was sick in bed and I was absolutely captivated by it. I had to read a different Eliot for a lit class like ten years earlier and really liked it (The Mill on the Floss), enough that it was one of the novels I didn't sell back to the bookstore at the end of the semester (though I'm not sure I've re-read it since, oops!), but that was all I knew about her writing before I heard this radio version.

I did read the book two years ago: as with a lot of long or difficult books I want to read but struggle with, I got it as an audiobook (free from librivox.org) and that worked really well for me. I remember being at the gym on a treadmill listening to this story, and that kind of thing. :) I absolutely loved the book.