Nonfiction Review: 'My Life in Middlemarch' by Rebecca Mead

My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Author Bio: REBECCA MEAD is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.  She lives in Brooklyn.


Random House's Book Blurb: A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch--and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories.

Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not.

In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.

My Review: Delightful - I enjoyed reading this more than I actually enjoyed reading Middlemarch. (Read my review of Middlemarch here.)

Mead has skillfully combined a memoir of her own life experience through the lens of George Eliot's novel, instructive incidents in Eliot's life as they relate to the novel, and opinions from the leading scholars of Eliot's work. It doesn't hurt that Mead is herself a talented writer. Taken together, these various elements add an extra dimension to my recent reading of the classic, increasing my appreciation for the lengthy work of fiction.

Here are some quotes from this book that I found particularly interesting and insightful:

“Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.”

“What's your favorite book?' is a question that is usually only asked by children and banking identity-verification services--and favorite isn't, anyway, the right word to describe the relationship a reader has with a particularly cherished book. Most serious readers can point to one book that has a place in their life like the one that Middlemarch has in mine.”

“Some very eminent critics writing in the decades immediately after the novel's publication felt that Eliot failed to maintain sufficient critical distance in her depiction of Ladislaw--that she fell in love with her own creation in a way that shows a lack of artistic control and is even unseemly, like a hoary movie director whose lens lingers too long on the young flesh of a favored actress. Lord David Cecil calls Ladislaw 'a schoolgirl's dream, and a vulgar one at that,' while Leslie Stephen complained 'Ladislaw is almost obtrusively a favorite with his creator,' and depreciated him as 'an amiable Bohemian.”

“Eliot was scornful of idle women readers who imagined themselves the heroines of French novels, and of self-regarding folk who saw themselves in the most admirable character in a novel, and she hoped for more nuanced engagement from her own readers. Even so, all readers make books over in their own image, and according to their own experience.”

“In the Life of George Eliot, John Walter Cross gave an intriguing account of Eliot's creative method. 'She told me that, in all her best writing, there was a "not herself" which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting,' Cross wrote.”

I think some time I would like to read George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda. It sounds good.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

FTC Disclosure: I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

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The Literary Tour of London by Tom Laimer-Read. $1.99 from Smashwords.com
Ladies and gentlemen, roll up one and all for the strolling tour of a lifetime! Follow in the footsteps of some of Great Britain's greatest writers! London is a city of literature and lust, poverty and riches, woe and wonder. Come experience the places that inspired and were influenced by some of the greatest writers of all time, and find out more about their fascinating lives.

#FridayReads September 12, 2014

Since I finished Middlemarch by George Eliot in July, it would be silly of me not to read My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead. Especially since I got a free hardcover copy from Blogging For Books. 

The Goodreads Blurb:

"A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch--and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories. 

"Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not.

"In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us."

I love books about books. Even though I didn't love Middlemarch nearly as much as Mead did, Mead's book is still quite fascinating. So far. I'm only about a quarter of the way through. 

'Religio Duplex:' How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion (Review)

Religio Duplex: How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion by Jan Assman, translated into English from German by Robert Savage, is described like this on Amazon.com:

"In this important new book, the distinguished Egyptologist Jan Assmann provides a masterful overview of a crucial theme in the religious history of the West - that of 'religio duplex,' or dual religion. He begins by returning to the theology of the Ancient Egyptians, who set out to present their culture as divided between the popular and the elite. By examining their beliefs, he argues, we can distinguish the two faces of ancient religions more generally: the outer face (that of the official religion) and the inner face (encompassing the mysterious nature of religious experience).

"Assmann explains that the Early Modern period witnessed the birth of the idea of dual religion with, on the one hand, the religion of reason and, on the other, that of revelation. This concept gained new significance in the Enlightenment when the dual structure of religion was transposed onto the individual. This meant that man now owed his allegiance not only to his native religion, but also to a universal 'religion of mankind.' In fact, argues Assmann, religion can now only hold a place in our globalized world in this way, as a religion that understands itself as one among many and has learned to see itself through the eyes of the other. This bold and wide-ranging book will be essential reading for historians, theologians, and anyone interested in the nature of religion and its role in the shaping of the modern world."

This is a dense, scholarly work by a German academic who's not only a noted Egyptologist but also well-versed in European history. Let's look at it chapter by chapter to see if we can make out Assmann's main arguments.

Introduction

The introduction begins with a quote by P.E. Jablonski: "Should we not say that Spinoza took his [doctrine] from the Egyptians?" Assmann's assumption is that the reader is already familiar with Spinozism (or Spinozaism). It's been many a year since my college philosophy course, so I am not. But, looking it up in Merriam-Webster online, we read, "the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, who taught that reality is one substance with an infinite number of attributes of which only thought and extension are capable of being apprehended by the human mind."

That's not exactly an easy sentence to understand, but the Wikipedia entry on Spinozism helps place it into context a bit. Spinoza was sometimes accused in his own time (1632-1677) and afterwards of being an atheist for his suggestion that the entire world was a material one. However, the philosopher's suggestion was closer to "the universe is a subset of God," a position sometimes referred to as "panentheism."

Baruch Spinoza. Public domain image

Assmann's point in bringing up the 17th-century Dutch philosopher was the concept of "natural religion" (as represented by Spinoza) as opposed to "revealed" or "positive" religion, which is what we usually think of when we think of "religion." Natural religion demands reason; revealed religion demands faith.

We're then introduced to two scholars who came after Spinoza, Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688) and Theodor Ludwig Lau (1670-1740). Cudworth was an English philosopher, and Lau was a German lawyer and essayist.

Cudworth's The True Intellectual System of the Universe (written in English, then translated in Latin and published in that scholarly language in 1733) was intended to refute atheism. It looked at religions of the ancient world, including Egypt's, and attempted to show that each of these religions showed evidence of belief in "all-oneness," a kind of pantheism (all is God) or panentheism (all is in God). Cudworth proposed that the ancient Egyptian religion had a polytheistic "outer" religion and a pantheistic "inner" religion. This is the main idea of religio duplex, or double religion.

Lau, in his Meditationes, Theses, Dubia philosophica-theologica, actually coined the term religio duplex. His work articulates the difference between "natural" and "revealed" religion, which again boils down to religion that can be reached through reason vs. religion that can be taught by the clergy and which requires faith. At about the same time Lau's work was published, Jacob Friedrich Reimmann described the ancient Egyptian religion as being divided into the "exoteric" and "esoteric" ("open" and "hidden").

Chapter 1. Egyptian Foundations: The Dual Meaning of Signs

The first chapter looks at how the Enlightenment-era philosophers arrived at their understanding of ancient Egyptian religion. The intent of this chapter is to trace the history of a thought. Assmann concludes that the 17th and 18th century philosophers understood the Egyptian religion through the extant writings of the ancient Greeks, most notably Hecataeus of Abdera. Hecataeus was a Greek scholar invited to Egypt by the monarch Ptolemy I Soter (circa 367-283 BCE). His job was to explain the traditional Egyptian religion to the Macedonian ruler; Ptolemy I was a general under Alexander the Great before he was made king of Egypt.

Ptolemy I Soter. Public domain image

Greek writers from this period in Egyptian history did not understand the Egyptian language and could not read hieroglyphs. To these Greeks, the Egyptian priests seemed to be practicing a public religion, one that involved parades and tributes to the various animal-headed gods, but also cultivating an esoteric religion known only to the priestly elite. This was a cultural error, Assmann contends.

Chapter 2. From the Dual Meaning of Signs to Dual Religion

The second chapter goes on to show how the religio duplex idea was picked up by Moses Maimonides (1135-1204). Maimonides was writing about Judaism. He thought the pagan religions were simple, but that Judaism alone had a complexity in that it was divided between "an exoteric political theology and an esoteric philosophical theology." Maimonides wrote in Arabic and Hebrew, and while he wasn't unknown to Christian thinkers in Western Europe, his works were not widely available to Western European scholars until Johann Buxtorf the Younger (Swiss, 1599-1664) translated Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed into Latin in 1629.

Bronze statue of Maimonides in Cordoba. Creative Commons image by David Baron

The ideas of Maimonides then influenced John Spencer (1630-1693), who - like Buxtorf - was a Hebrew scholar writing for the benefit of a Christian audience. Spencer advanced the idea of Judaism as a religion with two goals. His thesis was that Judaism was a religion that encoded its signs and symbols so that they were able to be read in two different ways.

Spencer and Cudworth were both working from Cambridge University and were peers. Both studied the ancient Egyptian religion. Yet Cudworth, Assmann asserts, was less interested in the semiotics (sign system) of ancient Egypt and more interested in the content of the ancient religion. Specifically, Cudworth's concern was the theology of Egypt's exoteric religion versus the theology of its hidden, elite religion.

An interesting sidenote in this chapter is the mention on page 49 of a historian named Isaac Casaubon who lived from 1559-1614. I simple wondered whether George Eliot named her character John Casaubon in Middlemarch after the 16th-century scholar. The fictional Mr. Casaubon is attempting to write a scholarly-religious piece about the unity of all world religions, and that seems like something Ralph Cudworth would be working on.

Chapter 3. Religio Duplex and Political Theology

Assmann begins by informing the reader that the term "political theology" was used in two senses during the Enlightenment era. The first sense is the identification of a particular religion with the state, a situation which creates the problems I read about Christianophobia. But Assmann's chapter is going to deal with the second sense, which refers to political powers using religion to further state goals, the main goal often being achieving civic peace and order.

According to the author, political theology in the second sense was criticized by both atheists and Deists. This chapter assumed familiarity with the concept of Deism. According to the World Union of Deists website, Deism can be defined thus:

"Deism is the recognition of a universal creative force greater than that demonstrated by [hu]mankind, supported by personal observation of laws and designs in nature and the universe, perpetuated and validated by the innate ability of human reason coupled with the rejection of claims made by individuals and organized religions of having received special divine revelation."

Essentially, Deism is the belief in natural religion and the rejection of revealed religion.

For the Enlightenment-era atheists, revealed religions were frauds perpetrated against the common people. For the English Deist John Toland (1670-1722), the pagan religions are merely superstitions, but Moses was excluded from the group of religious fraudsters. In Toland's writings, Moses is a philosopher who recognizes the God of nature.

John Toland. Public domain image

Following Toland's line of thought, William Warburton (1698-1779) wrote The Divine Legation of Moses. It purports to show that while paganism is a fiction invented for political purposes, there has never been a culture that successfully operated without a religion. He argues that political theology is necessary and that the Judeo-Christian philosophy is a logical and essential basis for civil order.

Sidenote: Toland writes, "...Isis has this inscription at Sais: I Am All That Was, Is, And Shall Be, Nor Has Any Mortal Discover'd What's Under My Hood. Isis therefore, whom the vulgar believ'd to have been a Queen...was the Nature of All Things, according to the Philosophers, who held the Universe to be the principal God, or the supreme being, and consequently abstruse or obscure, none seeing beyond the surface of Nature. But this they only discover'd to the initiated. To that of Sais corresponds another Inscription still remaining at Capua; To Thee, Who Alone Art All Things, O Goddess Isis."

Public domain image

He's referring to a passage written by the ancient Greek philosopher Plutarch (circa 46-120 CE). On this website it's quoted as: "In Sais the statue of Athena whom they believe to be Isis, bore the mysterious inscription: "I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my robe no mortal has yet uncovered." Apparently Plutarch was well-known in the 18th century, because the German poet/philosopher Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) wrote a poem called "The Veiled Image at Sais" in reference to the above passage.

Plutarch evidently identified the Greek goddess Athena with the Egyptian goddess Isis. You will have heard the name ISIS in the news quite a bit recently, in reference to the terrorist group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. An older name for Syria is The Levant, so sometimes it will be called ISIL, which is the acronym President Obama has been using. I think the President is trying not to offend Neopagans by using the name of a Great Goddess to describe an organization which is slaughtering people in northern Iraq. I think the President actually understands that we live in a multicultural world.

But I digress. I only thought it might be interesting to compare the idea of Athena and/or Isis as Supreme Being to the Gnostic conception of Sophia.

Chapter 4. Religio Duplex and Freemasonry

In this chapter, Assmann shows that an essay by Anton Kreil introduced Enlightenment-era German Freemasons to the idea of religio duplex. The Freemasons also read a novel by Jean Terrasson (1670-1750) called Sethos, which depicts its hero undergoing an initiation into the "Egyptian mysteries" upon entering a pyramid. In the temple of Isis, Sethos is offered a choice between the Draught of Oblivion which will make him forget and the Draft of Remembrance which will allow him to remember what he's learned. (Is that where the Wachowskis got the inspiration for the red and blue pills of The Matrix?) It's fictitious and only loosely based on the author's interests in history and antiquities, but some people took the depictions of the Egyptian mysteries quite seriously.

On page 107, Assmann sort of sums up the relationship between the Freemasons and the concept of an ancient Egyptian religio duplex in a paragraph that reads:

"This image of a split-level society, a society divided between superstructure and substructure, publicity and secrecy, accords with what the polyhistor Reimmann termed philosophia duplex, and it encapsulates how people pictured ancient Egyptian culture at the time. It also corresponds to the image the freemasons made of themselves as an elite that had taken cover in an underworld of secret ritual."

Mozart. Public domain in the United States

The rest of the chapter shows how Mozart's The Magic Flute can be understood on two levels. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was an active freemason, as was his father. This, I suppose, is simply one example of how the train of thought that began with Hecataeus of Abdera trickled out of the freemason lodges and into the larger Western European culture.

Chapter 5. In the Era of Globalization: Religio Duplex as Dual Membership

As we shifted into the modern era, the concept of religio duplex began to be understood as one's particular religion (i.e. Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc.) as one level and a universal human religion - an anthropological constant - as the second. Assmann claims this shift was articulated by Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) in his 1783 book Jerusalem. The freemasons and the other secret societies of the Enlightenment era - the Rosicrucians and the Bavarian Illuminati among them - accepted members regardless of their particular religions, and considered themselves the guardians of those few, specially evolved souls who were enlightened enough to recognize the universal human religion.

Following Chapter 5, there are two additional sections on how this train of thought can be followed into the present era, perhaps laying the groundwork for religions to co-exist in an increasingly globalized world.

This isn't a book that's likely to appeal to the casual reader interested either in the Enlightenment in Western Europe or in Egyptology. It's a specialized interest, to be sure. Philosophy majors might enjoy it, and so might people with a heavy interest in studying the history of freemasonry.

P.S.

I would have warmer feelings about Robert Savage if he'd chosen to translate "mankind" as "humankind." Come on guys, it's 2014. Enough of this exclusive language nonsense.

Review: 'The Casual Vacancy' By J.K. Rowling

I recently finished The Casual Vacancy, the first novel J.K. Rowling wrote specifically for adults and her first post-Harry Potter release. If you have not read it, please look away now, as this post is not spoiler-free.

I didn't know whether or not I would like this book before I started reading. I'd read a few reviews, and they were mixed. Some people didn't like the characters, saying they were horrible people and therefore made bad protagonists.

It's true there are some conniving, cowardly, malicious, misguided, and unkind deeds afoot in Rowling's fictional town of Pagford and its neighbor, The Fields. With a variety of selfish motives, people commit crimes and misdemeanors against their fellows. A few times, compassion and humanity shine through.

Some of the residents of Pagford and the surrounding area are:

- Howard Mollison, the obese 64-year-old owner of the town's deli, and his wife Shirley
- Howard and Shirley's son Miles Mollison, a lawyer
- Samantha Mollison, owner of a boutique lingerie business and highly unsatisfied wife of Miles
- Gavin Hughes, an insurance agent
- Kay Bowden, a social worker and mother of 16-year-old Gaia. The Bowdens are transplants from London.
- Parminder Jawanda, the local general practitioner and the mom of three teenagers
- Vikram Jawanda, Parminder's impossibly gorgeous husband, a heart surgeon
- Sukhvinder Jawanda, the youngest of the Jawanda children, teased at school for being overweight and having more facial hair than is considered typically feminine. Suhkvinder feels inferior to her older brother and sister because she has a learning disability and doesn't do as well in school as them. Because she's bullied by her peers and criticized by her parents, she cuts herself to try to relieve the pain and stress.
- Andrew Price, also sixteen, one of two sons of crooked, verbally and physically abusive Simon Price and nurse Ruth Price. Andrew has a crush on Gaia Bowden.
- Stuart "Fats" Wall, a thin middle-class boy who's been Andrew's best friend since they were four years old. Fats' favorite pastimes include smoking marijuana, opposing his parents at every turn, and obsessing over "authenticity" in a Holden Caulfield-like fashion.
- Colin "Cubby" Wall, deputy headmaster at the school Fats, Andrew, Gaia, Sukhvinder and the other teens attend. A nervous, fussy man with a large, balding forehead, Colin has a hidden illness.
- Tessa Wall, the diabetic school guidance counselor, wife of Colin and adoptive mother of Stuart
- Barry Fairbrother, the town councilor, a substitute teacher, and coach of the high school rowing team whose unexpected death from a brain aneurysm kicks off the plot of the novel
- Mary Fairbrother, Barry's grieving widow and the mother of their son and twin daughters
- Krystal Weedon, the girl from The Fields, Barry's favorite rower, and the daughter of a heroin addict

Okay, so the cast of characters is as large and complicated as that of Middlemarch. Barry Fairbrother dies in the first few pages, and much of the main plot centers on Miles, Simon, Parminder, and Colin all competing to fill the empty seat - the casual vacancy of the title - on the town council created by Barry's death.

I really enjoyed this book. For one thing, it's nice to see that J.K. Rowling's spellbinding storytelling skills carry beyond the Harry Potter novels. The author is witty, she's a powerful observer of human behavior, and she writes with such intensity I get wrapped up in her fictional world to the exclusion of reality.

None of the characters are perfect by any stretch, but I did bond with some of them. Krystal and Sukhvinder are my favorites. Krystal's swaggering bravado disguised her inner vulnerability, including the fierceness with which she loved her loved ones, her ultimate undoing. In many ways she was a victim of circumstance - as was her mother, although Terri Weedon's soul-crushing mistakes seem much less excusable given that she's an adult, she should know better, and she keeps making the same stupid mistake over and over...as addicts will do.

Sukhvinder seems to be falling apart, both from her own point of view and in the eyes of others. She doesn't seem to have much going for her, and yet she's a hidden well of strength. Through the events of the novel, Sukhvinder finds her voice and inspires her mother to become a better person.

Kudos to Rowling for writing complex, multidimensional characters who aren't stereotypes and who interact in complex ways. I'm now exciting to read the two mysteries Rowling wrote under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. (Sigh - knock one book off my TBR list, add two more. Story of my literary life.) Apparently this book is being made into a miniseries as a collaboration between the BBC and HBO, and I look forward to seeing it.

P.S. If I were to fantasy-cast this movie, I would want Vikram to be played by the beautiful and talented Naveen Andrews, an Englishman best known to American audiences as Sayid Jarrah on Lost. (Fans self.)

It's not a great picture because we cant see his eyes, but it is Creative Commons. Image by Kanaka's Paradise Life of Honolulu, Hawaii

I purchased this book with my own funds via Amazon.com and was not obligated to review it in any way. My copy is a used book that came from a library sale, specifically from the Pikes Peak Library District of Colorado Springs, Colorado.

I Finally Finished Reading 'Middlemarch'

Middlemarch by George Eliot

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have ridden the mighty moon worm!*

Well, no, but I did finally finish Middlemarch. I've been reading this book since January. I thought I would breeze right through it, but it turned out to be 800 dense pages of characterization of virtually every person in the fictional Midlands English town of Middlemarch. It centers mainly on two marriages: the marriage of young, idealistic Dorothea Brooke to the older, bachelor scholar Edward Casaubon, and the marriage of spoiled "princess" Rosamond Vincy to a newcomer to Middlemarch, the physician-scientist Tertius Lydgate. Rosamond's brother, Fred Vincy, wants to marry the sweet-natured Mary Garth, but encounters many obstacles in the course of that courtship.

Edward Casaubon is described as looking like the philosopher John Locke.

Public domain image

However, when I started reading this, I did not know what the philosopher John Locke looked like, so I imagined Edward as looking like the character John Locke on Lost, as portrayed by actor Terry O'Quinn. Edward's life work is a lengthy philosophical and theological work that compares several ancient mythologies. Part of the reason Dorothea married him is that she wants to be a part of something important, and she thinks helping Edward with his scholarship will help her achieve this goal.

Creative Commons image

While the Casaubons are on their honeymoon in Italy, they run into Will Ladislaw, a young cousin of Edward's. Will is considered somewhat disreputable in Middlemarch because his mother ran off and married a man "below her station," a Polish musician. He has no inheritance, no living, and is out in the world on his own. Dorothy feels an immediate sympathy with him. Edward feels jealousy over his wife's interest in Will, and changes his will to say that Dorothy will not inherit any money if she remarries Will.

I can't exactly say why, but I keep picturing Will Ladislaw as Ben Whishaw.

Creative Commons image by KikeValencia

Will and Dorothea are attracted to one another, but they are proper Victorians and wouldn't dare do anything about it. They can't even admit their attraction to themselves. Rosamond, on the other hand, is an improper Victorian. Because she's such an attractive young lady, she's used to flirting with men and having them give her anything she wants. In her head, she imagines Will is in love with her. She has no intention of acting on her attraction to Will, but she has a romantic fantasy built up in her silly little head. Rosamond's ignorance of practical matters causes her husband great, great distress.

This isn't an exciting classic, like The Count of Monte Cristo or Gone With the Wind, but it is an interesting book. I read it because my copy of Jane Eyre said that if I liked that book I might also like this one. I LOVED Jane Eyre. I must point out, though, that there aren't a lot of obvious similarities. Both deal with class differences and the shifting position of women in society, though.

Middlemarch isn't nearly as romantic as Jane Eyre, nor is it as witty as anything Jane Austen ever wrote. I said before (in this post) that I thought George Eliot was a contemporary of Austen and the Bronte sisters, but this wasn't accurate. George Eliot was born (as Mary Anne Evans) in 1819, and Middlemarch was published in installments between 1871 and 1872. Jane Austen died in 1817, two years before Evans was born. Emily Bronte's short life spanned 1818-1848, and her sister Charlotte lived 1816-1855. Jane Eyre was published in 1847. Charlotte Bronte came the closest to being Evans' contemporary, but she died relatively young and published her most famous work long before Middlemarch debuted.

George Eliot is more cerebral and philosophical than her Regency-era predecessor Jane Austen, and the pleasure of reading her is a more subtle one than the emotional Romantic-era drama of the Brontes. However, I was not unsatisfied with the ending, and I'm glad I had the patience to finish all 800+ pages.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

I bought this paperback at Barnes and Noble and was not obligated to review it in any way.

*Nerdy-ass Futurama reference. Sorry.

Book Club Friday: Current #FridayReads 6-20-14

Basically, I have a different book going in every room in the house. Let's start with the book I've been reading off and on (when not distracted by more exciting books), Middlemarch by George Eliot. 

I'm slightly more than 50% (that's just over 400 pages) through this enormous paperweight. It's interesting, but it's not exciting. I had hoped Eliot would be another Jane Austen, since they're writing about approximately the same era in British history. However, I don't find Eliot to be nearly as witty or entertaining as her contemporary. I'll stick with it just to be able to say I've read it, but it's not a can't-put-it-down like certain other thick classics I have known (i.e. Gone With the Wind, From Here to Eternity, The Count of Monte Cristo). 

Are there any Middlemarch fangirls out there? 

On my bedside table (actually on the floor next to the table) is The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling. I'm about a third of the way through it. It's funny because there's a Mr. Farebrother in Middlemarch, and the character whose (MILD SPOILER) death is a motivating factor in Rowling's plot is named Barry Fairbrother. 

There's a banker named Mr. Bulstrode in Middlemarch, and I can't help but wonder if the early-19th-century Bulstrodes were secretly a wizarding family, and if their descendant is the same Millicent Bulstrode whose cat's hair Hermione Granger mistakenly used in her polyjuice potion. 

It does seem like Rowling is a George Eliot fan. Because both books deal with small English towns and groups of people being petty and venal and scheming to benefit from a gentleman's death, some people refer to The Casual Vacancy as Mugglemarch. I'm liking it, though. No one can say Rowling isn't witty. 

In the kitchen, when I get bored while waiting for my grits to thicken, I'm reading This Star Won't Go Out by Esther Earl with Lori and Wayne Earl. It's the collection of writings and artwork by Esther, who passed away at the age of 15 from thyroid cancer. In a complicated way, she's part of the inspiration for Hazel Grace Lancaster in John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. 

I previewed This Star Won't Go Out here. 

Esther's only ambition in life was to be a writer, and you could tell she would've been a great one if her talent had been able to mature. In some ways it's very gratifying to read how much of her personality survives in her extant work, but at the same time, her loss is a very sad one. It makes me think of all the other kids who could've been someone great and never got the chance. 

On a much lighter note, the book I've been leaving in the car and reading whenever I get a little bored away from home is J.R. Ward's Crave, the second novel in her Fallen Angels series (about a decisive contest for human souls between archangels and demons). I just can't get into this series the way I can Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood novels. 

Book Boyfriend #311: Isaac Rothe. 

In the living room, I'm reading a book that arrived in the mail Tuesday, via Amazon's Vine program. I was in the mood for serious nonfiction, so I chose Christianophobia: A Faith Under Attack by Rupert Shortt. It documents incidents of religious-based violence in Christian communities, organized by country. The countries in which it's most dangerous to belong to a Christian church are almost all in Asia, but a few are in Africa, and only Turkey is in Europe. 

The cover shows the window of a church in Egypt and a Coptic Christian girl looking out fearfully.

So far, the author has done a good job of being fair to the people of other religious faiths who share space with Christian neighbors. This is not, for example, a book about what's wrong with Islam. The author acknowledges that most Muslims, like most Christians, are anti-violence, and that some Christians have committed acts of religious-based violence. 

Lastly (I think), in my Nook I'm about halfway through Play Him Again, a murder mystery set in 1920s Los Angeles, by Jeffrey Stone. 

What's fun about this book is how it weaves in historical figures of the period, such as Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Alla Nazimova. (You may remember Alla Nazimova from the nonfiction The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood.)

How many things are you reading? 

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Reading 'Middlemarch'

Submitted for your approval: a perfectly normal paperback copy of Middlemarch by George Eliot. It's the Barnes and Noble Classics edition, purchased at my local brick-and-mortar B&N in February 2013. Here it is waiting patiently on my bookshelf in a photo I snapped last year.

The front papers look perfectly normal.

The introduction seems to be perfectly fine. Then chapter one starts. Can you read what it says? It starts out with a Biblical passage, and then, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Well, that seems awfully familiar. It seems, in fact, exactly like the first page of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Okay, I never officially read Anna Karenina, but I may as well have, because I read all 600 or so pages of Android Karenina.

Either way, clearly some error has occurred at the Barnes and Noble publishing house. Pages 1-36 of this book are not Middlemarch, but Anna Karenina.

This one may be a bit harder to see, but if you zoom in closely, you'll see that after page 36 of Anna Karenina comes page 27 of Middlemarch.

I called Ben, the manager at my local B&N, and he said I could bring it in to exchange for a replacement copy. He checked the replacement copy - it's normal. Still, this is the very strangest thing I've ever seen a paperback book do.

On another subject, this mysterious, unsolicited package showed up from HarperCollins the other day.

What could be inside? I wondered. It turned out to be...

...an ARC of a dystopian young adult novel called Elusion by Claudia Gabel and Cheryl Klam. I must have either requested an ARC or entered a contest to win an ARC and forgotten all about it. I hope it's as good as Divergent.

OHP! Things I Read and Want to Read

Now that Valentine's Day is over, I'm ready to start pinning green things for St. Patrick's Day, but it's pretty early. So...books. Y'know, my usual obsession. 

Did anybody else read Where the Lilies Bloom in grade school? I remember it being pretty good - kinda like Katniss Everdeen's life minus the Hunger Games - which is to say, turn-of-the-century rural Appalachian. I need to reread this.



I read this circa 4th grade-ish. I don't intend to reread it, but I do think that Shane-Marian Starrett was the first fictional character pair I ever shipped, long before I knew what shipping was.



I want to reread this some time in 2013. I read it in high school and all I really remember is the loss of virginity scene, which is perfectly consensual yet physically traumatic.



I also intend to tackle Middlemarch in 2013. My annotated Jane Eyre said that if I enjoyed Jane Eyre, I would also like Middlemarch. Let's hope so. I already bought this paperback version at Barnes and Noble.



I also need to get this one. Even though I didn't love Jane Eyre Laid Bare, I'm perfectly willing to give it a chance.



First I saw this on Tumblr, posted by the artist who created it, Katie C. Turner.



Then I bought the magazine it was published in.



Debbie Stoller, the editor of Bust, titled her letter from the editor "Fifty Shades of WTF." It says what I think may be the smartest thing yet written about E. L. James and her Fifty Shades series:

"Millions of (mostly) ladies bought the titillating title, and almost as many folks mocked them for it, disdainfully pointing out that the book was badly written. But I mean, c'mon - nobody bought FSOG to stimulate what's between their ears; they bought it to stimulate what's between their legs. And I think it's that fact - that women (some of them middle aged!) spent money on something just to help them rub one out - that's rubbing people the wrong way. After all, nobody criticizes porn - a multibillion dollar that still caters mainly to men - for having crappy cinematography. We just assume that men, no matter their age or percentage of body fat, have sexual appetites that need to be fed. But when it comes to women, we seem to have confused the idea of 'being sexy' with 'being sexual' to such an extent that the idea of possibly unsexy women looking for a turn-on is as laughable as a monkey shopping at Ikea."



Now I'm looking forward to reading Carrie's Story by Molly Weatherfield (a.k.a. Pam Rosenthal). So far I've read Tristan Taormino's foreword, which says:

"Today, it seems no one can talk about a BDSM novel - hell, we can't talk about any erotic fiction - without invoking Fifty Shades of Grey. Carrie's Story was written decades before Fifty Shades, and it surpasses it on nearly every level. But one difference in particular stands out: Carrie's Story is about a submissive female heroine with a brain!"



Well, I contend that Ana Steele has a brain, but just belongs to a long romance novel tradition of very innocent, inexperienced female protagonists - but that's a story for another day. (This one.) Still, I think I will like Carrie's Story.

But nobody spoil Fifty Shades Freed for me. I haven't read it yet.