In the current issue of Commonweal you'll find my review of Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch, which I recommend highly, especially but not only to fans of the George Eliot novel. Mead writes perceptively about Middlemarch and Eliot, but also about reading and literature in general. Here's a passage that I especially admired:
Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.
As I wrote in my review, I share Mead's strong attachment to Middlemarch, and to Eliot in general. But I have also been "grasped and held" by books in a more fleeting way -- I think anyone who identifies as "a reader" would recognize what Mead is describing here, how a book, in the time before you finish it, can add dimension to your life even when you're doing other things. It takes me longer to get through a novel these days, with little children and very little time to read for pleasure. (Not counting reading with the kids, of course, which can be very pleasurable -- but they're still too little for anything that can't be finished in a sitting.) Thank goodness I have my commute a few times a week, because I realized at some point that I missed the sense of urgency and excitement that having a novel-in-progress brought to my life. A couple years ago I got a small pile of books for my birthday, as I often do. But I knew that I might not read them -- and that they would join the books I'd gotten the previous year, collecting dust on the shelf. So I made a resolution. Reading makes me happy, and not-reading makes me unhappy. So I would make a point of using at least some of my limited reading time to read books, and especially fiction -- instead of just the usual work-related stuff, and magazine articles, and Tweets and blog posts. I can easily fill up a train ride with that stuff, and sometimes I need to, but carving out just a little time to get lost in a novel has been a great mood-enhancer.
My choices have been varied, some favorite authors and some I've always wanted to read; some I've "found myself" in and some I've happily gotten lost in. Muriel Spark, Carson McCullers, Marilynne Robinson, Somerset Maugham, Alice McDermott, Valerie Sayers, Flannery O'Connor, probably others I'm forgetting. I have more lined up as soon as I'm finished with Middlemarch, which of course I'm reading again. (And there's a chance that may lead me to reread more George Eliot, but that wouldn't be so terrible.) One exception I happily made to my reading-fiction plan was The Wilder Life, by Wendy McClure, which I mentioned in a blog post a couple months back, and with which I followed up my weeks of reading the Little House books. McClure writes about her fascination with the fiction and reality of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and like Mead's book, hers is an insightful and entertaining look at how a particular work of fiction can grasp and hold and shape a reader.
So, readers, now that your summer is well underway: what are you "working on"? What books are giving your life extra energy and excitement? And: is there a particular book or author that has a Middlemarch effect on you -- something you found yourself in; something you keep returning to?
