Middlemarch by George Eliot

What does one really say about a classic? I've read this before, but didn't remember it very well, and overall I think I prefer The Mill on the Floss. Dorothea Brooke is a little too annoyingly good (I'm not even going to mention the nausea-inducing Mary Garth), and the descriptions of parties and country gossip got quite incredibly dull at times. I generally feel very conflicted about George Eliot's characters because they're so like personages out of fables, despite her being generally regarded as the embodiment of realism. It's really predictable just what everyone will do, think, and say. But somehow it's also really comforting and I love her descriptions. But I find her writing almost emotionally manipulative, because characters like Rosamond are annoying and exasperating beyond words, yet every time Eliot starts to criticise her, I want to rush to her defense and justify her. I somehow always wind up feeling that Eliot is unfair to the characters that she herself created in this novel. I think the characters in The Mill on the Floss are much richer and more satisfying, Maggie Tulliver is one of my favourite characters in literature ever. I think to a modern reader the moral upstanding of even the bad characters is rather suffocating. But overall, I really enjoyed reading it again, though Dorothea inspired me with little fondness and gave me a headache due to excessive eye-rolling.