Long books intimidate the modern, scattered reader.  In the “By the Book” interviews in The New York Times, writers often admit that Middlemarch is the great book they haven’t read.

Has no one read Middlemarch? I have the opposite problem. I love Victorian novels, and admit, not to be snobbish but because it is true, that I have read Middlemarch three times. 

I had hipster mentors, a married couple who read Middlemarch aloud to each other in Europe, and they inspired me to read Middlemarch when I was 17. I was already a classics junkie, but they certainly expanded my syllabus. On my own, I read a lot of German literature in translation, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Peter Handke. But I read anything and everything.

And honestly, I feel I must read Victorian novels or die. I have read two and a half new books nominated for the Booker Prize this year, one of which made the shortlist, and they’re fine, but I doubt I’ll read any more of them. I’ve read half of The Vivisectors, a beautifully-written longlisted novel, but I look at it with dread when I see it on my bedside table.

All because I need to read classics.  Some of you will get this. Homer to Virgil (The Aeneid is a homage to the Iliad and the Odyssey),  Petrarch, Milton, Keats, Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, Dorothy Parker, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Barbara Pym.

Any of these books are fine for me, but perhaps it is Middlemarch time again. It’s a comfort book!