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I first read Middlemarch by George Eliot when I was a teenager, when I was drawn to very long novels, and especially the English classics. I read it again some years ago and loved it, so was excited when I came across both Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss in a charity shop. I really believe George Eliot is one of the best novelists ever, so I am keen to read all of her works.

Characterisation is excellent – she seems to have a such a good insight into people and is so witty in some of her descriptions – I often laughed out loud. There are characters who behave very badly, but most do have redeeming features, or act through ignorance rather than malice. Maggie’s relationships with her parents, brother and aunts are all complicated, and despite the fact that society has changed so much since this novel was written, it is very easy to relate to Maggie’s struggles. I have read that this novel is quite autobiographical – if so, George’s life must have been so difficult. The descriptions of Maggie’s yearning for love and acceptance while being criticised for her dark colouring and spirited personality are heartbreaking.

I read this as part of the Goodreads AtY challenge – the prompt for this one was a book of more than 500 pages – my edition has 691 pages. I also read it as the first in my Classics Club challenge.

Overall this book was a joy to read and I heartily recommend it.

This club requires members to make out a list of at least 50 classic titles they intend to read and blog about within the next five years. So, here is my list, and my commitment to read these books before August 2024.

Anonymous	Beowulf – read 5 November 2021
Austen, Jane Bean, CEW Bird, Isabella	Northanger Abbey – read 5 April 2020 On the Wool Track The Englishwoman in America – read 30 April 2021
Blackmore, RD	Lorna Doone
Bradbury, Ray	Fahrenheit 451
Bronte, Anne	Agnes Grey
Bronte, Anne	The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – read 26 October 2022
Bronte, Charlotte	The Professor
Bronte, Charlotte	Shirley
Buchan, John Buck, Pearl S Buck, Pearl S Burns, Robert	The Thirty-nine Steps – read 27 February 2022 Pavilion of Women – read 10 October 2020 The Promise The Poetical Works of Robert Burns
Cao, Xueqin	The Story of the Stone V2 – The Crab-Flower Club
Cao, Xueqin	The Story of the Stone V3 – The Warning Voice
Cao, Xueqin & Gao E	The Story of the Stone V4 – The Debt of Tears
Cao, Xueqin & Gao E	The Story of the Stone V5 – The Dreamer Wakes
Cather, Willa Cervantes	O Pioneers – read 10 October 2021 Don Quixote
Chauvel, Charles & Elsa Cooper, Fenimore Dawood, NJ (Trans.)	Walkabout – read 19 July 2020 The Last of the Mohicans – read 19 July 2022 Tales from the Thousand and One Nights – read 29 December 2019
Defoe, Daniel	Robinson Crusoe – read 7 August 2021
Defoe, Daniel Di Lampedusa, Tomasi Dickens, Charles	Moll Flanders – read 10 March 2021 The Leopard Martin Chuzzlewit
Dickens, Charles	Our Mutual Friend – read 30 May 2020
Dickens, Charles	Barnaby Rudge
Dumas, Alexandre	The Three Musketeers
Dumas, Alexandre	The Count of Monte Cristo
Du Maurier, Daphne Du Maurier, Daphne Eliot, George	Rebecca – read 4 October 2020 The Birds and Other Stories – read 8 November 2022 The Mill on the Floss – read 12 August 2019
Eliot, George	Daniel Deronda
Eliot, George	Adam Bede – read 19 January 2023
Fielding, Henry Forester, CS Forster, EM	The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling – read 21 June 2021 The Good Shepherd – read 7 December 2019 A Passage to India – read 29 March 2022
Fortescue, Winifred	Mountain Madness
Gaskell, Elizabeth	North & South – read 25 April 2022
Gaskell, Elizabeth	Mary Barton
Gorky, Maxim	My Apprenticeship
Graves, Robert	I, Claudius
Graves, Robert	Claudius the God
Greene, Graham	The Quiet American
Haggard, Rider Harrower, Elizabeth Hardy, Thomas Homer	King Solomon’s Mines The Watch Tower – read 24 January 2023 The Trumpet-Major – read 12 December 2021 The Iliad – read 4 August 2022
Hugo, Victor	Notre-Dame of Paris – read 12 November 2021
Idriess, Ion L Idriess, Ion L James, Henry	The Yellow Joss & Other Tales – read 15 January 2021 Man Tracks – read 30 January 2022 The Portrait of a Lady
Kingsley, Charles	Hereward the Wake
Kipling, Rudyard Langley, Eve Lawrence, TE	The Best Short Stories – read 2 October 2019 The Pea-Pickers Seven Pillars of Wisdom
London, Jack	Best Short Stories – read 26 December 2019
Luo, Guanzhong	Three Kingdoms Vols 1,2,3
Mahfouz, Naguib Marcus Aurelius Maugham, W Somerset Niland, D’Arcy	Sugar Street Meditations – read 11 January 2021 Of Human Bondage – read 6 December 2021 The Shiralee – read 29 October 2019
Pasternak, Boris Prichard, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Katharine Susannah	Dr Zhivago – read 26 September 2020 Coonardoo – read 19 June 2022 Intimate Strangers The Pioneers
Pym, Barbara	Jane and Prudence – read 20 November 2020
Scott, Walter	Old Mortality
Shute, Nevil	Beyond the Black Stump – read 21 February 2021
Stead, Christina Stevenson, RL	The Man Who Loved Children – read 21 January 2021 The Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson
Stoker, Bram	Dracula
Stow, Randolph Stow, Randolph Sun Tzu Swift, Jonathan	The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea – read 5 December 2020 To the Islands The Art of War – read 28 November 2021 Gulliver’s Travels – read 18 August 2019
Tennant, Kylie Tennant, Kylie Timms, EV Tolstoy, Leo	Tiburon – read 11 July 2020 The Honey Flow The Beckoning Shore – read 6 September 2022 The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories (Vintage)
Tolstoy, Leo	Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
Tolstoy, Leo Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Anthony Turgenev, Ivan	War and Peace – read 29 September 2020 Miss Mackenzie The Warden Fathers and Sons
Verne, Jules	Around the World in Eighty Days – read 9 January 2021
Wells, HG	Tono Bungay
Wells, HG	Joan and Peter
Wodehouse, PG	A Damsel in Distress – read 10 December 2022
Wodehouse, PG	Piccadilly Jim
Wyss, Johann David	The Swiss Family Robinson – read 21 October 2022

This week I have finished two books, one for the Around the Year in 52 books challenge, and one for book club, which I managed to fit into a prompt for the Popsugar challenge.

This weeks AtY prompt was “a children’s classic you’ve never read” – I don’t like this type of prompt, because I’ve already read most of the classics, but realised that I had never actually read ‘Wind in the Willows’, despite owning a beautiful hardback copy illustrated by Pixie O’Harris, which I bought when my kids were little. They weren’t interested in it, though I think we started it several times over the years. Anyway, I finally read it through this week, and… hmmm, I know many people adore it, but I found it interesting but not especially charming. The characters were well-described and clearly relevant to the class differences in England at that time, and there were some amusing passages, but I won’t read it again, and will probably sell my copy as I don’t think it will be attractive to grandchildren either.

The other book I read this week was fascinating. ‘The Erratics’ won the Stella Prize this year, and I had already heard about it on podcasts and read reviews, so was looking forward to reading this extraordinary memoir. It is fairly short, so I finished it in two days, and then watched an hour-long interview with the author, Vicki Laveau-Harvie, as I particularly wanted to hear how her sister reacted to the book. The story is all about the two sisters being called home to rural Canada to look after their elderly parents after their mother falls and breaks her hip, and the father is unable to care for himself. The parents have disowned the daughters many years before, so there has been no contact, and it turns out the mother has been starving the father, who starts to come good once the sisters move into the family farm and feed him up while the mother remains in hospital. Mother has a personality disorder that has made life hell for everyone around her for many years, and this is represented with many amusing but awful anecdotes. It’s an excellent book that I recommend highly, and I’m looking forward to the book club discussion this week. I fitted it into the Popsugar challenge for the prompt “a book with a plant in the title or on the cover” – the cover has some trees in the bottom corner.

In other reading, I am still limping through both ‘Tracker’ by Alexis Wright, and ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. I have also begun reading ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot, for this coming week’s AtY prompt – a book with more than 500 pages (my Penguin Classics edition has 691!).

What I am reading now:

Black Opal, by Katharine Susannah Prichard, was written in 1918, and published in Australia in 1946. It is about life on the opal fields in western New South Wales at that time. My copy is an old hardback with very yellowed pages and very small print, salvaged from my elderly uncle’s collection. I have chosen to read it now for the Goodreads Around the Year Challenge, which I am doing in order – this week’s prompt was for a book published before 1950. So far I am enjoying it very much – Katharine Susannah Prichard writes beautifully and I have always enjoyed Australian historical fiction, so the whole experience with this old book is very nostalgic.

What I just finished reading:

The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton. This was for the Goodreads Popsugar Challenge prompt – a book with a ghost. Though it was very long (585 pages), it was an easy read and a great story, though I usually am a bit impatient with ghostly characters and unlikely scenarios. There was a lot of jumping around between timelines and characters which was often confusing, but there was enough repetition for me to finally get a grip on what was happening, and I found it a satisfying read overall.

What I will read next:

This is often tricky. For the AtY challenge, my next prompt is a book with an elderly character, so I plan to read Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout within the next week or so. I usually average two books per week, so might fit in another Popsugar challenge book, probably A Loyal Character Dancer by Qiu Xiaolong, for the prompt ‘a book written by an author from Asia, Africa or South America’. On the other hand, I really should return to Tracker by Alexis Wright – a tome I have taken a break from because it is so long and rather repetitious. I do want to finish it but am having some difficulty motivating myself to return to it as there are so many other great books waiting to be read!

This post is for WWW Wednesday hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words.

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.