Recommended Reading

I hightly recommend Rebecca Mead's "George Eliot, Middlemarch and Me" (which you can read in The New Yorker or The Guardian), which beautifully illustrates the value of returning to favorite novels (if they're good ones) at different points in our lives.

"[I]n revisiting Middlemarch in middle age," writes Mead, "the melancholy I experience in reading its final pages is augmented by a strange glimmer of hope, even optimism. I see in it now what I could not see as a young person: that wisdom is always being acquired, and is never fully accomplished; that love can arrive in unimagined ways, and may be found where we least expect it."

Indeed.

There are a number of authors I re-read this way, getting new things out of their books each time -- but I haven't returned to Middlemarch in ages. I'm now inspired  to pull it off the shelves again...and to order Mead's intriguing new book, My Life in Middlemarch.

The illustration above is by Pierre Mornet.