My Afternoon

And so, dear Reader, I spent 3 glorious hours this afternoon ensconced in a chair on the deck totally engaged in reading Middlemarch, probably my favorite novel of all time.

This is my third or fourth reading and I finally had to buy a new book because my original copy, dating from my college years, is coming apart. I kind of miss my old book with its underlined passages and scribbled notes in the margin but new or old, I am still hopelessly in love with Dorothea Brooke, the novel's heroine, and totally in awe of George Eliot's wisdom, her insight into human nature and her ability to write such a complex story so effortlessly. This is what novel writing is all about to me--creating a whole world, meeting a whole host of different people, working on a big scale not just replaying the seemingly endless anxieties of some narcissitic hero, usually male of course.


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