Middlemarch (George Eliot)

Middlemarch
George Eliot

An excellent read as recommended by my Long Distance Classic Novel Buddy (Zayn). A fascinatingly interweaved story focussing on a families and people. A lot of themes here from love, self denial, friendships, greed and hubris. All within a small town setting which apparently is Coventry in the early 1800s. The wider context is the parliamentary struggles to reform MP selection moving from the Rotten Boroughs to wider franchise. Eliot has a brilliant way of getting into the minds of her characters and you are drawn into their lives so that by the end you want to know a bit more about the rest of their lives. It's one of those novels that you can't put down and then as you get towards the end you slow down as you don't want it to end. A great read. I don't usually quote from books but there were quite a few that I found fascinatingly insightful and very relevant to today...

"But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings."  How true is that today - I'm sure a lot of people my age feel that when we were young the days were longer as not filled with electronic messaging.

"And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it."  Again, we continue to make the same mistakes.

"...for since professional practice chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs, the public inferred that it might be better off with more drugs still, if they could only be got cheaply"  How much more true is that today - and how GPs deal out the pills (bought by health service at great expense from big pharma) instead of looking at root causes.

"...we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance."  Again, ignore the man at the tube instead give ostentatiously to "big" causes.