Middlemarch

I finished reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch last night. I sort of feel like I’ve finished a marathon – Middlemarch is 811 pages of small print, little dialogue, and long paragraphs. There aren’t any pictures. Honestly, I didn’t feel like the action really kicked in until about chapter 70. Initially, I was at sea because the lead characters of the first section had disappeared by the second section. I knew they would all come together eventually, but my attention span has been shaped by TV sit-coms and hanging in for things to come together over a number of weeks of reading took some doing. I don’t want to say it’s taken me a long time to get through it, but the book’s been to Mackinac Island, Madison, Minneapolis and Seattle and I was compelled to finish it last night to prevent it from going to South Dakota and Iowa with me today.

Whew.

And yet, what a book.

Here’s the genius of it – if someone had to write a summary of the plot there would be a few twists and turns, but on the whole a dispassionate observer might feel there was nothing really remarkable about it. And they’d be right. It isn’t the story that matters. What matters is the way George Eliot shines a light on what it means to be a human being, and, most significantly, how we make moral and ethical choices. She shines an uncompromising light on the realities and complexities of marriage. She shines a light on the evil effects of gossip, on wealth, on class and on the clergy. Even though I found it slow going at the beginning, I had two people whose literary opinions I respect (one an English professor, the other a magazine editor) tell me that Middlemarch was their favorite novel. I was compelled to keep reading until the book started working its charms on me, and I’m happy to say eventually it did.

So here’s the point. I don’t expect you to rush out and get Middlemarch. I showed the book to someone as I was reading it and she more or less said, “Yikes, I’ll never read that!” The lack of white space on the pages is intimidating. What I do want to challenge you to do is to go find a classic you’ve never read and dive in. Classics are the cheapest books to read. They give them away on Kindle. Every library has them. They are the least expensive books in the store at Barnes and Noble. Pick up one you’ve never read. Get into Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope or Fyodor Dostoevsky or Mary Shelley or James Joyce or George Eliot or the Bronte sisters or Charles Dickens or Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville or Mark Twain or F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway and find out what all the fuss is about. Don’t settle for the education you got in high school and college. Keep growing; keep pushing yourself … keep reading.