Finished: Middlemarch (Eliot). Oh, this was a really good book! Long, but good. It wasn't the kind of book I could read fast. Every word in every sentence could not be missed, or a completely different meaning could be taken from the sentance. Therefore, I savored the book in more ways than one. :-)

I had been planning to read Eliot's Silas Marner, but after seeing Middlemarch on endless "top ten books of all time" lists, I bit the bullet and went for the almost 900-pager. I'm so glad I did! The book was full of great plots, intricate characters, lively conversations (personal, political, and gossip!), beautiful descriptions, inner-turmoil out the wazoo, and English "small town" society of the the early 1800's. I loved many of the characters, but none of them were without their flaws. I didn't hate any character, even though there were some we were supposed to loathe. Eliot put too much humanness in them all. I think my favorites were Dorethea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate...not a couple, by the way, and Caleb Garth.

Dorothea and Lydgate each had their own personal beliefs in improving the lot of mankind, and each married, one for the wrong reasons and one for love....and ended up regretting their marriages. Though the two were never thrown together romantically, they became good allies and friends. I loved seeing that in a book! I suppose in the perfect Jane Austen world, they would have found their way to each other in the end...but this was not Jane Austen, and the two characters I liked most were not a couple.

Though the entire book had some wonderfully written passages, here are a few of my favorites. I love this first one, though there was no mind-wandering allowed while reading this book without having to go back and reread the passage. And, I love the last one...so true!

Dorothea when her mind was distracted while trying to read:

When I want to be busy with books, I am often playing truant among my thoughts.

Lydgate, when he first sees the beautiful Rosamond:

And when a man has seen the woman he would have chosen if he intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.

Though she has many local unsuccessful suitors, Rosamond thinks she's falling in love with newcomer, Lydgate:

Yet this result, which she took to be a mutual impression, called falling in love, was just what Rosamond had contemplated beforehand. Ever since that important new arrival in Middlemarch she had woven a little future, of which something like this scene was the necessary beginning. Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind, against which native merit has urged itself in vain.

Dorothea, realizing her marriage was a mistake:

However, Dorothea was crying, and if she had been required to state the cause, she could only have done so in some such general words as I have already used; to have been driven to be more particular would have been like trying to give a history of the limits and shadows, for that new real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from the endless minutiae by which her view of Mr. Casaubon and her wifely relation, now that she was married to him, was gradually changing with the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had been in her maiden dream.

Describing Mrs. Garth's "handsome" looks:

Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry--the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy--"Such as I am, she will shortly be."

When Will and Dorothea are parted due to circumstances, and against their wishes:

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind.

Loved the book...still pondering whether it goes into my all time favorites list. :-)