phantomtomato

Just one post from me to close out the final two months of 2025. Offline (which is most of where I’ve been), I spent these months on a paper deadline, moving out of Boston after my temporary residency, managing a home remodel, and doing a bit of winter break travel. Not much time for reading, so I only read three short books across two months. Expect a similarly lean next couple of months—I will be traveling internationally for a month between January and February and might compile those months into one reading post as well. Maybe I will finish at least one book!

Hope you’ve all been having a nice winter season and enjoying a break, or time with friends or family. :)

The Loser, by Thomas Bernhard
Translated by Jack Dawson

The Loser is a stream-of-consciousness style short novel about three men: the unnamed narrator, Wertheimer, and Glenn Gould (IRL pianist Glenn Gould, 1932 - 1982). All three pen were piano students together in their youth in the world of this novel, and their lives diverged from that point—Glenn Gould off to prodigal fame and an early death by stroke; Wertheimer giving up on the piano and eventually killing himself; the narrator rejecting his musical training, becoming a writer, and attempting to document the lives of his friends.

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I think that the summary of this, much like Mrs Dalloway or Shyness and Dignity, is that such a book is a journey best undertaken when one can read for prose. Ultimately the story does not matter, and the characters are necessary for voice but often peculiarly flat in that theiir relationships exist in retrospect. There’s a weird combination of amazing focus and shallow depth of field, so that perhaps one or two characters approach real, but their sharpness compared to surrounding fuzziness makes htem unreal again. I’m prepared to say that every reader should try something like it—if only to know how else a commentary can look, outside the Austen-shaped bounds of society novels. I appreciate that I’m missing a great deal of this one. Reading it made me think, though. I’ll hold some of its ideas for a while.

Old School, by Tobias Wolff

Old School is an American boarding school novel—from 2003. Written in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace, Wolff gives us a semi-autobiographical look at the life of a New England preparatory student in 1960. I find these books quite different from their British counterparts—more cynical, for one, but also more distinctly alien, in that the narrative is positioned as remote and not an invitation into that world. The boys usually leave it, violently, through war and expulsion and running away. They don’t belong there, and neither do you. I don’t quite know why; perhaps it’s something to do with the fact that boarding schools aren’t/weren’t as central in civic and social life here. The quintessential American school setting is a public high school. And this book is not that, it takes place in the near-mythical wilds of a private boys’ school in the Northeast.

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So, I think, this book is for fans of those other more well-known classic American boarding school novels, who want to keep seeing this world. It fits that genre to a tee, and it’s a fair entry for its look at Jewishness, or for asking how an author develops. I don’t quite think it matches them, though. There are probably better modern books on the subject. (And there’s definitely a better modern movie: The Holdovers [2023].)

Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
Translated by Kenneth Burke

Gustav Aschenbach is a middle-aged widower and author who, inspired by an encounter with a stranger one day, decides to set off on a vacation. He ends up in Venice, where he becomes enthralled by a teenage Polish boy named Tadzio. This obsession grows from observing the boy at their shared hotek, to following his family through the streets of Venice, to making the decision to withhold information about a cholera outbreak in the hopes of being trapped in quarantine with the family. Through all of this, Tadzio and his true opinion of Aschenbach remain enigmatic. Aschenbach is ultimately unsuccessful, and the novel ends with death by cholera—the titular death in Venice.

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I'm cheating on this one—half of the last book was read during October, but, well, I've been too busy to type these up until now, so they're all going in together. :)

The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst

This novel tells the story of Nick Guest, a recently-graduated Oxford student who becomes a lodger in the London house of the Fedden family. Toby Fedden, his uni friend and crush, makes the connection—Toby’s parents, Gerald and Rachel, take Nick on as a guest to watch the empty home while they are on holiday. Nick’s new friendship with the troubled daughter, Catherine, paves the way to a longer-term living arrangement, and the result is a three-part story about 1980s British politics, touching on class, wealth, race, queerness, and scandal.

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So I would firmly call this a good book, if a slightly long one for how much I got out of it. Any unevenness of feeling that I have about it is in wishing that it had fit in more, not to have done less of what was there. Nick is not the most likeable protagonist, but these hangers-on to wealth rarely are, and his qualities enable him to have more proximity for longer, which gives us access to so many different stages of excess. What’s interesting is how little the university friend Toby is around for any of this, and how much is done with Nick’s awkward role as part-guest, part-staff, and part-family. What’s there for those is all great, and the setting is vibrant. I think this really solidly falls into the literary category of my reading—the sort of book which needs attention and doesn’t strain itself to amuse you, but which has the writing quality to honor that attention.

Bunny, Mona Awad

This novel follows Samantha Heather Mackey, a 25 year old woman in her second and final year of a creative writing MFA program at a fictional elite American university. Her cohort is all women, but the other four students (the Bunnies) form a clique which Samantha both envies and reviles. Their instructors include the woman leading their writing workshop (who Samantha nicknamed Fosco after The Woman in White) and Samantha’s thesis advisor, nicknamed The Lion, a man who seemed to withdraw from her after mysterious incidents in her first year. Outside of her program, Samantha spends most of her time with a wild goth chick named Ava, and the novel creates tension through Samantha’s divided loyalties between her existing friendship with Ava and the new opportunity offered by invitations from the Bunnies.

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The overall impression I would convey is that this book is messy. The main character is messy, the story is messy, and the prose is messy, so the message and intentions cannot help but also be messy. I did not find it the fun kind of mess.

The Guest Lecture, Martin Riker

Our protagonist, Abby, is a female Economics professor who has recently been denied tenure. Despite this career upset, she must complete a pre-existing commitment to deliver a guest lecture. This book takes place in the span of just one evening, the sleepless night before that guest lecture as she plans her talk with the help of her imaginary friend, John Maynard Keynes.

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What I can’t settle on is whether this makes the book “bad.” I mean, in my subjective opinion. I don’t recommend it, based on how I felt the story moved away from its most interesting elements over its progression. I didn’t like the protagonist, though of course that alone doesn’t make a book bad. But mostly it’s that I don’t come away with a sense of what Riker was trying to achieve, and all of the key elements (experimental prose, flaws of the protagonist, growing away from the academic thesis) can come across quite differently depending on the light that you read them in. Perhaps the most accurate thing for me to say is that Riker did not sell me on a vision which would allow me to read this combination in its best light, and if it were a better book, I could have been sold.

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

Clarissa Dalloway is the Late Victorian Ideal, grown middle-aged. It’s 1923, she’s in her early fifties, and she must prepare to host a high society party at her London home this evening alongside her husband, Richard Dalloway, who is some sort of minor conservative politician. Over the course of a single day (I’m sensing a theme: this, The Guest Lecture, and the Solstaad book from August), we follow her preparations which take her around London, where her life brushes up against so many others. The book flits between perspectives, picking up old friends of Clarissa’s but also strangers, including our deuteragonist, the young war veteran Septimus Warren Smith. We see the parallels and contrasts between different genders and classes in Interwar England.

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My thoughts on this book are a bit more scattered than I would like, or than this book deserves. It was a good introduction to Woolf, and reading it has made me interested in reading more of her work, which has evaded me despite owning Orlando for years. I suggest a deliberate read-through, one with time for rereading sections over again, and though I cannot prescribe a “best” way of reading it, I can say that one gets a lot of mileage out of a beater paperback and a pencil, here.

Love, Leda - Mark Hyatt

This novel has a fascinating backstory to its publication. Hyatt was an outsider poet in the 1960s and early 1970s, before he died by suicide. His poetry remained a niche enthusiast interest for much of the past fifty years, and luckily two of those enthusiasts decided to compile his poems into an anthology and reached out to his family and friends as part of that process. One of his friends had kept thousands of pages of his writing, including a complete novel manuscript, safe for nearly five decades. The result is this, rescued from oblivion. Hyatt’s novel is a wild, first-person stream of consciousness narrative about the titular Leda, and his experience as a poor, queer man in 1960s London.

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I do recommend this. To me it’s incredible to recover lost art and give it public due, sort of a time capsule, and something that could not be created now. It is rougher than other novels—the author was not here to work with an editor, and the compiler wisely opted not to impose much editing. It has the quality of a manuscript, but a quick, pacey one, if the style agrees with you.

The Incandescent - Emily Tesh

Dr. Sapphire Walden teaches invocation magic (demon summoning) at Chetwood school, a private boarding school in England. We follow the course of one school year with her, in which her staid schoolmistress life is shaken by a dangerous demon incursion, the hauntings of her own past, student dramas, possession, and two separate romances. This is an eventful, teacher-focused magical boarding school novel for anyone who has ever thought, “but how did those Hogwarts instructors manage?”

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In sum I’d put this down as a solid modern fantasy novel that’s most interested in the question of what it means to be a teacher—as a matter of logistics, career, and identity. It has a cool approach to integrating magic into our world, it has a high-stakes plot, and it has romance elements, but those are mostly secondary to the examination of life at Chetwood and concerns of identity within that system.

Shibboleth - Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

This book came recommended by a friend who knows the author; it seems to have had a fairly small promotional cycle on its release this year, so I wouldn’t have heard about it otherwise. Shibboleth is a satirical campus novel set at modern-day Oxford, taking aim at the patterns of identity politics in student activism. The protagonist is Edward Zahir, whose grandfather was from Zanzibar but who was raised essentially white and middle-class English. The students around him are invariably wealthy, but from different backgrounds: white, English Angelica; Black, Egyptian, Muslim Youssef; white, English, gay Conrad; Black, American Liberty; white, German, Jewish Rachel. The identities of this group, plus a loose collection of secondaries, form the network of conflicts which take place in the novel.

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As it stands, I cannot recommend this book. It was also quite long, over 350 pages, so the reader needs to be very tolerant or very determined. I might just not get the context fully, not being English or knowing that educational system. Definitely the humor was not for me. I recognize parts of my experience in there, of course I do, but without the tempering elements which make them real. And I learned, in reading this, that I need more empathy for characters in the stories that I read—even, especially, the ghoulish ones. I only resented the protagonist more for having been given the privilege of depth and nuance, and having been forgiven his shortcomings, when the others so often were not.

Small World - David Lodge

Small World is the second book in the Campus Trilogy by David Lodge, a famous set of connected satirical campus novels. I’ve read and reviewed the first one previously. I wouldn’t have read this except that I found a copy in a little free library just around when I was reading Shibboleth, and I can never resist a narrative set. Despite that, let me be plain that I strongly do not recommend this book or any others in the trilogy, as the two that I’ve read have been horrifically sexist, hardly free of other bigotries, and simply not that compelling outside of academic navel-gazing interest.

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So it’s overall a major distraction, and the satire is weakened to the point where I begin to question its value. And Lodge is careful and observant, and describes a culture and an era that I see value in having documented—but it’s not worth reading at this cost, and frankly, it’s not worth recommending, even for the historical value, without heavy caveats. Which I have never seen done.

After reading The Secret History in May, and surprising myself with my enjoyment of it, I did the natural thing and immediately read four more Dark Academia(ish) books to explore the genre. I ended up with a pretty broad mix: scifi and fantasy and horror, a range of school types (primary, undergraduate, graduate), and both British and American offerings. Still, looked at as a whole, there were a lot of similarities which I think defined the books as (mostly) fitting the image of the aesthetic, for better and for worse.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

To start, the least-fitting of the bunch. This book came as a recommendation by way of a colleague who teaches a course called “Dark Academia.” They said that this book always ended up being the showpiece of the class.

To head things off, I don’t think this would be a common or expected rec for the DA genre. It is a speculative fiction novel set in 1980s-1990s Britain (Wales is mentioned!) in which our first-person narrator Kathy H. gives us a retrospective of her life. Her narrative is ostensibly a recollection of childhood friendships with Ruth and Tommy, met at a boarding school called Hailsham, but oddities in her story soon make clear that her childhood was not normal and that her world has very dark undertones. The prose is chatty and easy to read, so the effect is a discomfiting, tense sense of dread which does not match the lighthearted childhood stories.

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Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

Katabasis is the sixth novel by R. F. Kuang and the first of hers that I’ve read (thanks to a friend of a friend who had early access). It is a fantasy in which two rival graduate students of the same deceased PhD advisor journey into hell in order to retrieve their advisor’s soul. It takes place in a slightly alt-history version of 1980s Cambridge, and it is a critique of the abuses endemic to graduate school. As a fan of portal fantasies and a lover of navel-gazing books about academics, I am its core audience. Unfortunately, I think it was bad.

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Overall, I don’t recommend this. The lead is difficult to deal with beyond what I write here, the prose is bland, the magic and the settings are uninspired. It does stand out for being a Dark Academia book about graduate school, but really, just go (re)read one of the comp titles.

And He Shall Appear by Kate van der Borgh

This was a true and clear Dark Academia novel, playing the concept straight. An unnamed protagonist narrates from twenty years in the future, describing his time as a Cambridge music student (two Cambridge books in a row!). The odd Northern duck out, he quickly sets his sights on joining the friend circle of wealthy, attractive Bryn Cavendish. Both men share fraught relationships with their fathers (the narrator’s father was an alcoholic who passed away; Bryn’s father is a famous stage magician who is separated from the family), but Bryn’s glamour and flair for the sinister captivate half of campus. In the present, our narrator hints at the knowledge he has about Bryn’s mysterious death.

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One of my biggest critiques is that And He Shall Appear does not follow through on its drama. I like a low-stakes story. This isn’t that. This is a high-stakes story which does not deliver. We are promised black magic, a death, addiction, and class commentary. And yet the answer to those is passivity. The result of all the build-up is nothing: no magic, no murder, just a lonely adult drunk twenty years on. All of this for a guy that the narrative only ever manages to tell us is worth this obsession. And then there’s not even any school in it.

If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio

I’m glad that I ended with this novel. It helped me understand why there is so much hope for Dark Academia as a contemporary genre.

If We Were Villains is the story of seven Shakespearean Theatre students, currently in their fourth year at the fictional Dellecher Classical Conservatory. Dellecher is an arts school in rural Illinois with a prestigious, harsh reputation—each year, half of the students are not invited back, leading to things like a seven-person senior class in a major. The Dellecher drama program only studies and performs Shakespeare, making for a heavily-referential novel. It is a frame story, narrated in both the present (10 years on from school) and the past by one of the thespians, Oliver Marks, who explains the death of one of his friends during that final year at Dellecher.

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I recommend this book to anyone looking for a recent take on Dark Academia, especially if you’re otherwise leery of cynicism. I came into this without any sense of the plot or relationships, and I really enjoyed encountering them without spoilers. It was a rewarding book for letting the mystery unfold at its own pace.

This post is very late for a monthly roundup, but you’ll forgive me as I’ve just spent two weeks in Japan! It took me a few days after returning home to get my bearings and type these up. Next month: Stephen Spender, Donna Tartt, and perhaps a third book.

Nottingham Lace, E. M. Forster
I read the unfinished manuscript which would have been one of E. M. Forster’s first novels, now included in the Forster Abinger edition volume entitled “Arctic Summer & Other Stories.”

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Gerald Eversley’s Friendship, J. E. C. Welldon
This book imagines itself to be a school novel of the late Victorian tradition, with an odd-couple romantic friendship amidst a background of Muscular Christianity. It also imagines itself to be an Austenian romance crossing class lines. It also imagines itself as a tragedy of youth in the vein of Goethe. Don’t you like all of that in the same novel?

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Stoner, John Williams
In Stoner, we follow William Stoner from his late adolescence through his fateful exposure to the academic field of English literature, in college, and subsequent career as a professor. As the son of poor farmers in a still-young (early 1900s) Midwestern USA, he was fated to experience some hardship—but the slow-burning tragedies of his full life are thoroughly the product of his own choices. This is an engagingly well-written story which sometimes allows you to forget its heaviness as you fly through the pages, but death and defeat haunt William Stoner, and the end of the novel will not allow you to forget that.

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This is a simple book. The story is briefly described: an aging, widowed British author becomes obsessed with a young American movie star and contrives to meet him. It is short: the copy that I read is fewer than 140 pages. It has no elaborate structure, Adair having even foregone the use of numbered chapters.

I’ve been mostly offline lately—since about December of last year. It’s been one of those periods wherein I think that after this current hurdle, I’ll surely get back to Dreamwidth, Tumblr, and fandom… but that event passes onto the next and the next and the end result is that I need to reckon with having lost the habit. Reading for pleasure has seen a shade of that, too. I’ve finished a couple of books (The Book of Life, Kitchin; Autobiography of Red, Carson) and parts of two others (The Farewell Symphony, White; The Woman in White, Collins), but I’m definitely reading less and I’m less excited to spend time on it. When I’m home after work and dinner, I want to sit on the couch with my spouse, YouTube, and a knitting project. My mind can’t seem to handle the demands of reading or writing, and all I can summon energy for is keeping my hands busy.

This is a long way around say thing, with my spouse traveling this weekend, I wanted to read a simple book and finish it. That was neither of my reads-in-progress. I heard about Adair because he wrote the introduction to the reissue of a Forster novel—I must find a copy of that essay—and I picked this novel of his on a whim.

It is simple reading, but clever, and with attention to its primary character so as to make the reading rewarding. Adair draws a priggish, unselfaware man for his narrator. This makes his inner monologue at times a chore to read (his vocabulary is intentional obtuse), but watching him unravel in his obsession is at turns amusing and horrifying. It’s a sketch of a bad ending resulting from extreme repression—not only of the sexual kind, but social and emotional as well. Our narrator (mostly nameless, as the book is written in the first person) has few friends. They all date from his days as a promising undergraduate at Cambridge. His stable writing career and family wealth could be the basis of a comfortable life, but in his unwillingness to connect with other people, he’s made a tomb of them. When a series of circumstances lead to him accidentally watching a teen flick at the cinema, thus introducing his fascination with the actor Ronnie Bostock, we see at first not the way that the obsession will consume him but rather we see the neglectful way he has treated the world for some three decades. He has a naïve, juvenile understanding of his own culture, stuck somewhere before his adulthood, perhaps in the Edwardian times of his revered Forster.

The unfolding obsession with Bostock somewhat modernizes him, but more devastatingly, it forces him to leave his tomb. He confronts his sexual attraction to men by recalling how he’d never engaged in even the slightest fumbling during his “undersexed” school years. He’d thought of himself as boringly heterosexual, though one wonders whether he ever achieved any degree of passion for his wife. He’s a man who cannot masturbate to completion, and the impact of all this pent-up inability to self-examine is the finale of the book in which the narrator travels to America and engineers a confrontation between himself and the subject of his obsession.

Throughout, Adair shows the depth of his narrator’s self-delusion in a really compelling way. The narrator is a British writer of a certain age—it would be unbelievable to not show him as introspective. But his introspection never solves anything. It’s very effective writing of a deeply troubled, intelligent man, and it’s very sad.

[I]magine the hubbub I would cause were I to drop in on my Cambridge acquaintances and recite to them everything I know of an obscure American actor of whom they would never have heard and to whose one feature of interest they would be totally insensitive. Only I, I exulted, only I and that legion of fans who do not count, have recognised this rare flowering among weeds…

I’m not sure if I want to read any more from Adair soon—this was very anxiety-provoking by the end—but I’m glad to have read this one. I recommend it to fans of character studies.

The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Werther is this term’s reading group book—sort of. We finished the (quite short) book by early October, and are now discussing the opera adaptation. It’s very fun! I appreciate getting to see both a text and its adaptation in close proximity, especially a text and an adaptational medium that I would never have chosen to approach on my own.

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A Glass of Blessings - Barbara Pym

Our delightful first-person narrator is Wilmet Forsyth, a 1950s middle-class London housewife in her thirties. Pym takes the basic premise of boredom with one’s marriage amidst a backdrop of neighborhood gossip and makes it a compelling piece of character work as we’re exposed to each player and their dramas through Wilmet’s judgmental eyes.

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I read a lot this month! And most of it after I finished my vacation. I can’t explain this, even given how short most of these are. I guess I was just in a reading mood.

A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
I knew this book would feel different from Forster’s other novels—it was written a decade after Maurice, the last of them, and after so many changes in Forster’s personal circumstances. I suppose that’s why I gravitated towards it last.

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I find this book challenging to recommend. So much of its context is foreign to me, and I’m guessing a reader more informed about this era of British and Indian history would pick up many things I did not. However, I do not want to under-appreciate its reflection of Forster’s values, and I would certainly want to rank it higher than A Room With a View in consideration of that. I can’t say it’s anywhere near my favorite—perhaps that makes my prior comment hypocritical. I am glad to have read it. I may need to separately reflect on the Forster Novel Reading Experience and my journey through it. I can’t believe that I’ve finished them!


A Separate Peace, John Knowles
I’ve heard that this book is commonly assigned reading for high school students in the US. It was not for me, but I can see why it would be—the omnipresence of WWII and all of the ways it shows up in the narrative would be great for teaching literary devices—but I can also see why it is no longer as favored. The other omnipresent theme is homoeroticism, and I’m not sure that the context of a modern high school is equipped to handle the discomfort of reading portrayals of romantic friendship. Perversely, it would be easier to engage with that at a time when you could issue a flat denial—they’re not gay—than at a time when you must discuss the possibility that they are.

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Overall this was a gorgeous novel and a fast read. It gets added to my pile of midcentury novels about boys in adolescence as a tapestry for examining greater social/political shifts. It is an extremely worthy addition.

I also wrote a fic for this after finishing:
A Good Sport, ~3k. Sports Men by Haruomi Hosono was the soundtrack.

Mike and Psmith, P. G. Wodehouse
I put this one off for a good long while. Do you ever encounter that sort of mental resistance, of knowing that a piece of beloved media will not land for you and so you don’t want to consume it and confirm that knowledge? I’m not letting anyone down by not connecting with a book, but as tied to broader English boarding school fandom as this one is, I still felt that unreasonable disappointment.

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Owen Wingrave, Henry James
I spied this in the ficinabox tagset and was intrigued.

Have you ever put yourself through James’ prose? I can now say that I have. This short story was a ghost story, which I didn’t know from the outset. James’ prose, combined with the slow build towards the ghostly elements, left me wondering what exactly I was reading for a good 75% of the piece. I should have guessed it would be a ghost story, all of these Victwardian short stories seem to be, and so that one’s on me.

Anyway, a character dies in that classically abrupt “a ghost did it” way that all these stories go, and that’s the end. My conclusion is that Henry James should not have written, and least of all ghost stories.

The Heirs of Tom Brown: The English School Story, Isabel Quigly
This was mentioned in a Tumblr post and, as it was available for two-week lending on the Internet Archive, of course I snapped it up. Quigly covers the progression of the genre through specific exemplar authors, and so I skipped and skimmed as needed. She is also extremely opinionated in her evaluation of the literary merits of these books, and sometimes I had to skim out of sheer disagreement.

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Two books this past month, both starting with the letter ‘P.’

How was your June? Here, June marks the first full month of summer on campus: almost empty buildings, no meetings, no events. The bagpipers practice out on the quad in the afternoon. I spend the evenings thinking I can still hear the sound of pipes. I also traveled and hand a wonderful time visiting a great friend. ❤️

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
I associate Susanna Clarke with JSMN, which I haven’t read, but which a good friend dragged around for what felt like a year in middle school. It was probably a month, but time works differently when you’re twelve. JSMN is a brick, and I don’t read bricks—but when a friend indicated that Piranesi was more reasonably-sized, I decided to give it a read.

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Generally I would recommend Piranesi, and I expect that I will consider future works from Clarke, as long as they’re also more conventionally-sized.

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
This is a book that I thought I would never read. Such is the power of friendship, I guess, that I’ve ended up here.

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My primary reaction to finishing this is to think, well, I’ve done it! It feels like one of those life milestones, like living alone for the first time, or perhaps buying a vehicle. I have read Pride and Prejudice. I think it will be useful to have done so, so I’m glad that I did.

Middlemarch is the kind of novel which I would usually resign myself to never reading. It's monstrously long and truly that's the biggest hurdle, above any other considerations—I never read any single story so long. But it came up as a reading group at my workplace and, given the opportunity to be peer-pressured into finishing, I took it.

I'm very glad I did! I did not, strictly, speaking, enjoy Middlemarch. It's comprised of eight installments, called books, and there are a few of those that I had to drag myself through in order to finish. Book... five? Six? The one in which we get mostly election gossip when the character of Mr. Brooke pursues a seat in parliament—I could not tell you what happens for many dozens of pages there. I know he's mocked during a speech, but the rest of it, eh! And I think that's okay.

Many more words

I am so glad that I got to read this as part of a group. We met five times throughout and discussed along the way. The project was meant to simulate the serialized release schedule of the original publication run. Discussing with a group each month helped me pay so much more attention to the development of each storyline than I would have if I'd somehow pushed through alone! Everyone brought their own perspective to the meeting, and people focused on different moments or character beats. I feel like I got a much fuller understanding of a still very dense novel, and knowing that I would be discussing it helped me slow down and note Eliot's writing at a sentence level, which was rewarding! She's funny, biting, observant, and moralizing all at turn.

Sir James took out his handkerchief and began to bite the corner.

And although ~1870 is earlier than most of my Victorian reading, it was still striking to compare her tone to someone like F. W. Farrar. Especially in the early books of Middlemarch, you can see Eliot using a first-person narrator at the ends of chapters to drive home a lesson, much like Farrar, but with very different directions as to the moral weight of characters' actions!

For my part I have some fellow-feeling with Dr. Sprague: one’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.

Speaking of the characters—there are a ton of them. Middlemarch was pitched to me as a slow novel with a lot of very careful character portraits, which were great at capturing real types of people and real types of behavior. It is not a sensation novel, and not moved by a single plot or single lead. I think that's mostly true! We meet so many people, and I'd name a bunch of them as very important: Dorothea Brooke, Mr Casaubon, Will Ladislaw, Fred Vincy, Mary Garth (and her father Caleb), Tertius Lydgate, Rosamond Vincy... I'm leaving out Mr Feathersone, though he was also instrumental to the first half of the novel, and characters like Mr Brooke or Mr Bulstrode, whose arcs are not romantic in nature but do move the romantic players around the board. And all of these characters have families: spouses, children, siblings, cousins. There are townspeople whose names recur throughout many books, sometimes with gaps in between, such that keeping them all straight proved impossible for me! Another reason to be grateful for having a discussion group.

To oversimplify, I'd characterize the novel as about three women's marriage prospects: Dorothea, Mary, and Rosamond, all of whom are in their late teens or early twenties for the two years of the novel. They all do end the story married, though how many times, and how they got there, look very different. Contrasting them seems to be encouraged! It also encouraged me to pick favorites, lol.

Mary Solid throughout and solidly well-liked by me. She's stable, intelligent, and knows what her own boundaries are. My reading group puts that down to her being the only child of a happy, loving marriage—the best marriage in the book!—and watching her wait for Fred Vincy to become a respectable man was rewarding. Her most interesting moment comes early, when she is the caretaker for old Mr. Featherstone and she refuses to become entangled in the drama of his will. For the second half of Middlemarch I found her arc inevitable, and no longer particularly exciting, though I did feel for Mr. Farebrother when Mary rejects his implied offer of marriage. But also, Fred was too clearly on the rebound then, and too clearly fated for eventual marriage to Mary.

Dorothea Fantastic turnaround. I despised her in book one! Her sister, Celia, was so much more compelling to me. The way that Celia pushes for their deceased mother's jewelry, and the sister relationship there, was incredibly interesting. Celia drops off in interest after that, Dorothea marries an obviously terrible choice and is miserable and surprised about that, and then is surprised that another young man (her husband's cousin lol) considers her attractive. Mostly I found myself wanting to take her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. Yes, she was drawn to be a naïve and unworldly character, but knowing that did not make it less frustrating! So I thought I'd quietly resent her until the end—except that she does have a lovely moment of character growth in the final book, demonstrating her willingness to exert her sense of moral justice even when the men in her life are urging her against it. It was lovely! It's really unfortunate that I found her second husband Will, that younger cousin, so much less compelling by the time they got together. I wanted him to prove he wasn't actually a dilettante, and he never really did.

Rosamond Well. I wished cholera on Rosamond during one of our discussions, so. God, what a miserable character! She's vain and shallow and refuses to take responsibility for her own choices. My dislike of her was very strong; I admit I probably read her husband, Lydgate, more sympathetically in response to that. I felt terrible for him. What an awful marriage. I didn't think I could find a marriage worse than that of Dorothea and Casaubon, but then Rosamond and Lydgate came along to prove me wrong. There's a line to exemplify Rosamond's character which I think bears quoting:

In fact there was but one person in Rosamond’s world whom she did not regard as blameworthy, and that was the graceful creature with blond plaits and with little hands crossed before her, who had never expressed herself unbecomingly, and had always acted for the best—the best naturally being what she best liked.

Partway through (around the end of book five) I was so compelled by the contrast between two of the younger men, Ladislaw and Lydgate, that I sat down and wrote fic about it:

To Like What We Are Given, Ladislaw/Lydgate

I would not call this a slashy book, nor a femslashy one. It really is all about the m/f marriages and marriage prospects. But the effect of reading the book in parts was that when Ladislaw and Lydgate are both miserable about their desired women in roughly the middle of the story, they are briefly compelling together—Lydgate is miserable in his impulsive marriage, which has just begun to encounter the crises of their very different dispositions towards wealth and social standing; Ladislaw has idealized his attraction to the widowed and unattainable Dorothea, with whom he imagines perfect happiness and synchronicity. I loved the idea of Lydgate being infuriated by that idealism and attempting to dim Ladislaw's bright star, while also releasing some of his tension through extramarital sex.

Of course, by the end of the novel, this was no longer as interesting to me. Their characters move in different directions and that brief moment of contrast and tension becomes less striking. I'm glad I got the chance to write that before book eight + the epilogue sucked the wind out of my sails!

Overall, I can't rightly recommend Middlemarch as a reading experience, because I recognize that most people would be undertaking it alone. (I'm not volunteering for a reread!) It was fantastic to read and discuss as a group. It's an odyssey to do without that support, I'm sure. The colleague who ran the group said that they had stopped teaching Middlemarch—that even with a month dedicated to reading it during a course, students struggled with the length and breadth of the novel and didn't learn much from it, on average. I can see why it would be so difficult to teach! But I'm very glad to have the experience, and it's great context for the rest of my 19th century reading, and also I get to understand a classic Smiths lyric. ;) Totally worth the investment.