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!
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