Marian Blog

Middlemarch – 2: Old and Young

NOTE: This is an in-depth book review and CONTAINS SPOILERS.

In the first part, George Eliot introduced us to the young Brooke sisters—sweet, simple-natured Celia and her fervently religious older sister Dorothea. The latter becomes enamored of an elderly scholar, Mr. Casaubon, while evading the advances of Sir James Chettam, a respectable but (to Dorothea) utterly prosaic gentleman. Book 2 continues this drama and fleshes out a range of other Middlemarchers, including the young and ambitious Tertius Lydgate, glamorous Miss Rosamund Vincy, and the banker Bulstrode and his associates, eager to strengthen their influence over the politics and religion of this provincial English town.

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Marian Blog

Where’s My Summer?

Today I was scrolling through Goodreads and got hit by a funny feeling of nostalgia. Seeing other people had finished books one after the other, I felt both inspired and a bit saddened.

These past few months have been weird on several fronts, with so many changes in my personal life, good and bad. I miss the simpler times when summer meant making a dent in my reading list, sitting outside (in milder temperatures!) and getting lost in a tale of yore. Reading in 2022 has been painfully slow for me, and though I’ve more or less settled down into a brand-new life, it hasn’t really caught up yet.

If I had a week to myself, this is the sort of summer I’d like to have:

  • Finish Middlemarch and all my other current reads
  • Pick up an “axe” of a book—maybe the rest of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories or another stab at The Mosquito Coast
  • Read another Japanese novel
  • Finish Andrew Yang’s Forward or Matt Sheehan’s The Transpacific Experiment
  • Watch more adaptations of books I’ve read

Even if I can’t get to all this, it is nice to write it out.

What about you, how’s your summer reading going?

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