One of my reading goals for this year is to read a book written before the 20th century. This may not sound ambitious to some, but I am sorely aware of my lack of direct exposure to the canonical works of English literature, and I want to correct that.
When I set this goal, I already had a specific book in mind: Middlemarch, George Eliot’s sprawling domestic epic set in a fictitious English town in the 1830s. One of the benefits of choosing such an old book is that it’s in the public domain, and as such is available for free through Project Gutenberg. The ePub file is pleasingly hefty; it clocks in at over 1,400 pages on my eReader app.
Middlemarch is large enough that I know if I try to rely on my typical python reading habits, I will bounce off it and fail. So I have devised a cunning plan: read the whole thing slowly over the entire year. There are 84 chapters. This equates to 7 chapters per month, or roughly one every 4 days.
Broken down like that, it’s actually quite feasible!
This slow, measured pace means that the writing style is not as difficult to get used to as I feared. Right now, I’m at the point where Dorothea and Casaubon are about to return from their honeymoon in Rome, after a few fateful meetings with Will Ladislaw. Eliot’s wry observations about human nature, and about Dorothea’s particular flavour of prideful self-abegation, started out as delightful, but are quickly becoming heartbreaking. And who knows what’s going to happen to Lydgate, and Bulstrode, and Mary Garth, and all the rest; it will be a pleasure to find out.
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