Middlingmarch
Congratulations to me, it is still May, I didn't miss getting a newsletter out!
I actually have one newsletter already finished and another I'm ready to write, but they're all about July or later releases, which feels mean to write about so early. But luckily I just finished Middlemarch literally an hour ago and I have been waiting to talk about it.
Let me start with a bold statement: I didn't really like it. I guess it's fine if you want a very very long (900+ pages!) historical novel (no I know it's historical to us but it was historical at the time, which was a downside not a perk as a modern reader, apologies to all the historical novels that also may not have aged well after 150+ years) that like yes is ahead of its time in many ways. But. Well. Who is in the mood for that? I don't know, but definitely not me. I guess the people who reread it every year, which I honestly cannot fathom.
I have to wonder if finding it extremely mid (heh) is part of that theme I keep coming back to over and over again in this newsletter and my own brain, if this is me changing. This isn't one of those times where I read the book at 17. I read Middlemarch once before, but my first read was in 2013. It was a pretty tumultuous time in my life. It was just a few months after starting again on my own waiting to get my divorce all settled. It makes sense that I would have looked for something that would impose a kind of order on chaos. Because I liked it very much. Enough that a year later I went back to Eliot to read Adam Bede, which I also enjoyed very much.
I don't remember having any criticisms the first time I read it. I know my favorite part of it was Dorothea, and she was my favorite part again. Dorothea at 19 reminds me very much of what I was like at 19. Very strong-willed, very naive; a combination that makes you feel like you know exactly how the world works when actually you don't. And I loved following her as she lived out reality and lost all traces of that self-indulgent fantasy. But then that was just part of the book, the early parts, and there was so so much of the book to go. And when Dorothea does reappear after that, she is just, well, boring. Now that she has Learned Things she is simply saintly, perfect, an unbelievably good person. The only flaw she has, unfortunately, was also more suffering for me: she is in love with a really stupid boy. I mean I guess he's also "noble" because, like Dorothea, he does not trouble himself with frivolous nonsense and gossip. But, I don't know, this dude has very little to recommend him. Neither does anyone else!
The problem is I hated everyone in this book.
Ok there are some exceptions. I didn't hate Mary Garth. And I didn't hate Reverend Farebrother. But neither of them is particularly interesting and what I would have enjoyed was the two of them ending up together. Instead Mary Garth married a total jerk who doesn't deserve her, who avoided absolute ruin multiple times only by luck and the sacrifice of people who seem to think he is worthy of it. (He is not!!) And Farebrother I guess just stays at home and hangs out with his elderly mother and spinster sister forever. Boo. Bad ending. Every time Mary's love interest appeared I said, aloud, "Fuck Fred Vincy, I hate him so much." I do! He sucks!
The thing that drove me even more bananas is that ELIOT KNOWS. She knows all these people suck and she is delighted by it. And look, that would be fine. I would love it if Eliot is like This is gonna be super fun, I'm gonna write this very modern novel about all these complicated people who do stupid things just like regular people. I would have liked that book.
The problem is that this book is something different. This book is I'm gonna write this very modern novel about all these complicated people who do stupid things just like regular people and then I am going to show you how one person can turn them all into better people simply by being kind and good. It is just. So. Cheesy. And this is where I think the change in me really kicks in.
Because apparently a decade ago, going through some of the worst months of my life, I found it a five-star read. FIVE STARS! It clearly struck a chord with me. I devoted two months of reading time to it. I spent six weeks reading it, spending my new commute to my new job on the bus and then the orange line and then the red line with my kindle open. A week after I finished it I wrote a blog post about how I was feeling good about the world. I was trying really hard to move from feeling sad and frustrated all the time to feeling something like optimism. It's really obvious in my writing during the two months I was reading this book. (For a real deep cut for the old school blog readers, I started this book a week after I pulled the lady off the subway tracks.) And I can see how Dorothea would speak to me at that time. She makes a bad decision, she marries the wrong person, but she is able to build up this new life anyway.
Now, well, I am way better off. I don't have anything like the struggles I had then. But my opinion of the world? It is in the toilet. I do not feel optimistic about people, not generally or specifically. I have been proven wrong a few times, but mostly I feel like I see it right. Everything I see is another reason to stay pessimistic. And that version of me just cannot feel at peace with Middlemarch.
(Let us entirely set aside the political/historical aspects of this novel because I honestly do not know enough about the Reform Act of 1832 or whatever to be able to speak to them and I was constantly bored by all that stuff anyway.)
Where we end with Middlemarch is that good people do good things even when it would be easier to do bad things--and I am with you so far, yes good--AND that those good things magically make things better, make annoying and selfish people into better people because... reasons. Because they are so touched and transformed by this charity or something.
It was troubling. Because I was so enjoying early Dorothea and I was so over later Dorothea. I just felt like we were going straight into repeating the same mistakes Dorothea made earlier. That now it is Eliot who has the fantasy that if you just continue to be good, other people will rise to the occasion. I wish I could believe that. I wish I could find it to be a beautiful and edifying worldview.
The one thing I do stand by is that Eliot is very good at observing people. She tends to go on and on about it, but before she decides she is going to make bad people better simply through the reception of goodness, she's got a great eye.
I did this on audio and I admit that I was tired of my fave Juliet Stevenson by the end. I had to take a 3 week break! It just went on forever! I will need a good long Stevenson break.
I know that this is a 150 year old classic of literature that many consider the best novel in the English language but I think it's just okay. Only the hottest of takes in this newsletter!!!
And now for May releases. There are not a lot of them. I only really have one to recommend:
I liked Maren's debut novel Sugar Run quite a lot but I like Shae more. Both follow queer characters in Appalachia. But there's something about Shae's stripped down first person narrative that spoke to me in that way that I know I will remember. Shae speaks to us so frankly, she does not like to get vulnerable with you, there is something steely in her voice. And yet even if she doesn't seem vulnerable in her language, she tells us every awful mistake she has made in her story. Similar in a lot of ways to Pizza Girl, though the two protagonists are both so distinctive that they also feel worlds apart.
But I do kind of have one more:
I do not generally care much for series and I rarely read YA anymore, but I was really excited to see a sequel to Tess Sharpe's The Girls I've Been. I had a galley... and then I didn't read it. On purpose. Because I had such a grand time with the audiobook of TGIB that I wanted to do the same for TGIQ. I am listening to it now and very happy to be back in it even though I haven't finished it yet so I am kind of cheating by mentioning it here. These books are crime novels that really balance light and dark effectively. Light, enjoyable character interaction but some really traumatic backstories that always add some dread. Sharpe reads them herself and I trust her very much, as a few of the hours I spent with TGIB were white knuckle driving through backroads in a snowstorm in the mid-Atlantic trying to stay in one piece as I watched cars go sliding off in all directions around me. And I made it completely intact, so I think Sharpe is good luck.
Anyway I know it isn't much for May but May has only a couple hours left anyway so it's fine. June was better and July was even better than that. Gonna be a good summer for books.