Middlemarch wasn't the only book I read in the first half of this year, but it did take me about five months to read! It is an absolute tome. It's Liz's favorite book, and I know there are others (I think Jonathan Franzen) who have listed it among their faves. I've been meaning to read it to see what the fuss was about, and then Liz and I saw an incredibly beautiful edition at The Book Loft in Columbus, OH, with an introduction by Zadie Smith. So we got it and eventually I read it.

This book was written in the 1870s, set in the 1830s, and covers almost nothing of consequence. It chronicles the daily lives of middle and upper-class Brits... their loves, their losses, their conversations, their miscommunications, and mostly their thoughts. So, so much of this book is dedicated to the interior strands of thought passing through the minds of characters.

When I say "nothing of consequence", though, I mean only on the grandest scale. For the characters involved, the issues of the position they hold and relationships they maintain are of the utmost importance. Of course they are; that's how it is for you and me, as well. This is where Middlemarch shows its wisdom. "Non-fiction" means history, or philosophy, books about business, or whatever. And "fiction" means made up stories about the lives of characters. But between non-fiction and fiction... which form of writing is more "real"?

All of the constructs of non-fiction are, after all, basically made up: historical currents are identified in retrospect, to make sense of chaotic sets of events. Philosophical frameworks are spun from the matter of their social context to help pull together meaning for a society. Business books teach you how to cope and make sense of completely arbitrary economic dynamics. Fiction, on the other hand, is about human experience: the only topic on which you can be sure you have knowledge, beyond all ontological threat. Your self-esteem, your anxieties, your relationships, your money, your work. These things are not "made up" - they're the realest it can get. This is what Middlemarch knows, and taught me, and why it is now one of my favorite books.

George Eliot sets out so knit a deeply human and empathetic layer around the hard and essentially Stoic realization that our bodies, our feelings, and our relationships are most of all that we have. And she affirms this by demonstrating that the way we feel about these day-to-day vicissitudes is a) important, by their impact on how we experience life and b) essentially universal. Reading this book, I was impressed over and over again with how Eliot found things to write about that are still relevant 150 years ago: the emotional bottleneck of being engaged and the emotional flood that follows a wedding, or the lengths boys will go to avoid asking their fathers for money, or the ridiculous amount of relational injury people will assume rather than ask a vulnerable question. It was personally validating, but also a celebration: "Oh look," I thought, "We're all the same."

This book is like the anti-Dostoyevsky. Instead of following characters around who are thinking massively large thoughts about war and God and Man, we observe characters sitting at their dressing table, thinking about love and boys and money. But this is so much better, and so much more important. There's one character, who loves to think about large and lofty things of consequence; and she's the most tortured of the bunch.

And, of course, it's wonderfully written. It's massively long, and it was written a long time ago, so starting out can feel like breaking in a pair of soon-to-be comfortable shoes. And the length, I think, is part of the message. It's about mundanity's importance, but about mundanity nonetheless, so being a bit slower than it needs to be is part of the study. In that way, it reminded me of The Pale King. But it's a beautiful book, and absolutely worth taking slowly. A friend of mind referred to it as "gentle and invigorating" - and now I can't think of a better way to put it, except to add -- because no one told me this going in -- it's also very funny!

If you read it, let me know - I'd love to talk about it.