THE MILL ON THE FLOSS, PART 2

Update: Only on page 100 of 500, so I have some serious catch-up reading to do on the plane to Minnesota. On the plus side, I’m enjoying it much more than expected. My progress has only been impeded because of a heap of library books demanding urgent attention (due dates approaching, renewals maxed out). I read a nice little Connie Willis novella, Inside Job, and am hurtling through The Best American Travel Writing 2006—I’m a sucker for these annual anthologies, and am eternally annoyed that the Pasadena library doesn’t carry more of them (no Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best Food Writing, Best American Magazine Writing, or Best Crime Writing this year, boo!). Of course, I’ll have to clear my schedule come 2007, because my Reading Project list has ballooned to a whopping 20 volumes, most of which I’m quite excited to crack open. Unlike this year’s classics-heavy “homework reading,” it promises a lot of fun action, mystery, and humor, including works by Roald Dahl, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Arthur Conan Doyle, Shirley Jackson, and P.G. Wodehouse.

Anyway, I loved this passage on the heartbreak of childhood from TMotF:

Very trivial, perhaps, this anguish seems to weather-worn mortals who have to think of Christmas bills, dead loves, and broken friendships; but it was not less bitter to Maggie—perhaps it was even more bitter—than what we are fond of calling antithetically the real troubles of mature life. “Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by-and-by,” is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother or nurse in some strange place; but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth and manhood; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief at the reality of their pain.

So true. Bonus points to ol’ George for the painfully sweet and precise “tiny bare legs above our little socks” detail. And also, using the odd verb form “blent.”

THE MILL ON THE FLOSS, PART 1

Time to fulfill another arbitrary, self-set goal—read The Mill on the Floss before the end of the year. I don’t feel an especially great desire to read the book anymore (having been on my mind for so long, it seems dull in comparison to all the shinier, flashier, newer books on my list), but I greatly desire to have read this book so I can get on with my life. All the George Eliot books I’ve read have been good (Middlemarch, Adam Bede, and even Felix Holt: The Radical), but I have no particular interest in the story of TMotF for some reason. I don’t know why—usually I enjoy tales of bright, spirited, unconventional young girls. Maybe it’s already knowing how the novel ends. Spoiler alert: It’s a downer.

Anyway, I opened my paperback library copy this morning (the copy I own is an enormous, leatherbound, gilt-embossed hardcover hand-me-down from my father, too bulky to carry around) and, in an effort to reassure myself that this wasn’t that daunting a task, did some long division in my head. The novel is 515 pages long, so I only have to read 16 or 17 pages per day for the next 31 days. That sounds doable. I read my allotment for today and actually started enjoying myself a little bit. An extra bonus of reading the library copy is that it’s an Oxford World’s Classics edition, with all the nice explanatory notes. I encountered a great word, “franzy,” which apparently means “frenzied, crazy.” I like it. Boy, making myself read TMotF in the month of December sure is franzy!