finish line
Do you know how close I am to being done with Middlemarch? I am so close. I am thisclose. That’s really close. It’s thrillingly close.
Do you know how little I want this book to end? So very little. I am loving it. One of the most frustrating things about reading this book is how much I love it, but how easy it was to avoid going back to it. I would pick it up, and get immediately absorbed, have to put it away, and then it would take actual effort to force myself to pick it back up.
There is no explanation for this. I knew it was a great book, and I knew that I was enjoying it (it is hard to not be aware that you are enjoying something, I imagine, unless your lack of self-awareness borders on legal blindness) but there was something formidably off-putting about it when the cover was closed.
The first time I ever started reading it was for a class, and for that class – a graduate school course – I think I decided I wanted the important, hefty, weighty edition that would make me look very intellectual.
Fucker was the size of a brick. A really fat brick. An oversized brick with a weight issue. It was a big goddamn book, and man did I hate lugging that thing around.
In class, the instructor only had us read halfway. I’m still not sure why. But as soon as I got up to the halfway mark, the book went bam! on the floor, and even though I wanted very muchly to pick the thing back up, to finish the book that I had kind of been loving, I couldn’t do it. It was too big, I said.
Get a smaller copy! people said. And eventually, I did. And I had no excuse to not pick it up anymore, to not carry it with me and read it on the bus and finish the stupid thing and I still didn’t because I am weird and dumb.
However, despite my astonishing levels of weird dumbness, I am almost finished! I am going to get into the bathtub tonight, and I am going to add bubbles that smell like coriander and lemon, and I am going to stay in that tub while the water turns cold and terrible, terrible things happen to good people because that is the way life is and that is what George Eliot writes about.
Oh, I hope it has a happy ending.
Do you know how little I want this book to end? So very little. I am loving it. One of the most frustrating things about reading this book is how much I love it, but how easy it was to avoid going back to it. I would pick it up, and get immediately absorbed, have to put it away, and then it would take actual effort to force myself to pick it back up.
There is no explanation for this. I knew it was a great book, and I knew that I was enjoying it (it is hard to not be aware that you are enjoying something, I imagine, unless your lack of self-awareness borders on legal blindness) but there was something formidably off-putting about it when the cover was closed.
The first time I ever started reading it was for a class, and for that class – a graduate school course – I think I decided I wanted the important, hefty, weighty edition that would make me look very intellectual.
Fucker was the size of a brick. A really fat brick. An oversized brick with a weight issue. It was a big goddamn book, and man did I hate lugging that thing around.
In class, the instructor only had us read halfway. I’m still not sure why. But as soon as I got up to the halfway mark, the book went bam! on the floor, and even though I wanted very muchly to pick the thing back up, to finish the book that I had kind of been loving, I couldn’t do it. It was too big, I said.
Get a smaller copy! people said. And eventually, I did. And I had no excuse to not pick it up anymore, to not carry it with me and read it on the bus and finish the stupid thing and I still didn’t because I am weird and dumb.
However, despite my astonishing levels of weird dumbness, I am almost finished! I am going to get into the bathtub tonight, and I am going to add bubbles that smell like coriander and lemon, and I am going to stay in that tub while the water turns cold and terrible, terrible things happen to good people because that is the way life is and that is what George Eliot writes about.
Oh, I hope it has a happy ending.
1 Comments:
Where does one get bubbles that smell like coriander and lemon!??!!? - Sarah
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