Currently Reading

A few weekends ago, David was at the computer and I was standing beside him when I got the urge to pull all of our books out of our four bookcases and organize them (thanks to David, I have become an organizing freak-of-nature). So I did, and I organized them according to genre and time period. Organizing the books was nice, because it made them so much easier to locate and it satisfied the OCD in me. Wednesday, I was standing around again when I decided to count all of the books I've read in our book collection. I realized that there is an entire bookcase full of our books that I have not read! Because of this realization, I have decided that I am not going to buy another book until I have read every book that we own. We have lots of good books, so I am very excited about the next several months of reading I have ahead of me. I've decided to use my blog to keep track of the books I'm reading.
So . . .

I'm currently reading: Middlemarch by George Eliot


Middlemarch was originally published between the years of 1871-1872 as a serial before being published in one volume in 1874. It is subtitled A Study of Provincial Life. The story is about a group of characters living in the Midlands of England in the early 1830s.
I really love this book! I love how you get to see into the lives of all of the characters-you get to hear their thoughts on everything: love, religion, politics, family, economy-and you get to see how all of their lives are connected by the choices that each one of the characters make. The female characters are my favorite part of the book. They are so interesting because their choices (both big and small) cause me to experience sympathy, rage, and complete understanding-all at the same time! Eliot is great at developing all of her characters in a way that makes you very interested to see what happens to them.
It is a long book (almost 800 pages), but the serialization makes it really easy to read. I also really love how Eliot heads each section in the book with quotations. Some of them are in foreign languages, but the guide in the back of the book translates them and it's fun to try to figure out how each quote is going to relate to its section.
David's brother recommended this book to me, and I'm very grateful that he did, because it has become one of my favorites! Hopefully, this part of my blog will serve a similar purpose. I can keep track of my reading and recommend books, simultaneously!
I expect to be finished with Middlemarch by the end of next week, so look for a new post soon!