Notes from a Small Island

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson  324 pp.

This has been on my "to read" list for a long time. I'm sorry I didn't read it sooner. This is such a fun book. Bryson details his travels about his adopted homeland of England traveling by foot mostly but taking the odd bus, train, or ferry when necessary. He gives droll descriptions of the small towns and their inhabitants and revels in the scenery to be found in the remotest of locations. Other times he rants about the curious inability to get to nearby places without roundabout trips via bus or train. In between he provides tongue-in-cheek commentary on such things as peculiar town names (Farleigh Wallop, Pinhead, West Stuttering...), inexplicable guest house "instructions", surly, entertaining, and/or just odd people he encountered, and other characteristics that make Britain British. I found myself laughing out loud during many parts of this book. This one is well worth giving a go.

Middlemarch

Middlemarch by George Eliot, 827 pages

For those of you not already reading Middlemarch in our adult summer reading program, Middlemarch is a fictional town set in the English countryside in the early-ish 1800s and focuses on some of the more well to do families that live there. We first meet Dorothea Brooke, a young woman with the lofty goal of learning and making life better for those around her, but decides to do that by marrying Mr. Casaubon, a man almost three times her age. Then there is Fred Vincy, at the crossroads of his life: in love with his childhood friend, Mary Garth, but bent towards self-destruction through gambling and idleness. And then there is Tertius Lydgate, a doctor who moves to Middlemarch with the plan of bringing a new practice of medicine to the masses, and with the equally lofty goal of making some new scientific breakthrough. Of course, there are many characters I'm leaving out (Will Ladislaw, Rosamond Vincy, Nicholas Bulstrode, Peter Featherstone, Camden Farebrother...), but most of the action revolves around these three. We've spent a lot of time discussing how this book is considered a staggering work of genius, and while I'm not sure I can speak to that, I can recognize why it's considered a classic. Eliot manages to juggle all of these characters and their pains and dreams and suffering without dropping the ball with any of them. With a narrator's eye view of each of these characters, she manages to inspire pity and sympathy for some of the more awful ones (see our summer reading blog for more on that). And though her writing tends toward the analytical, I still managed to find myself sucked into what would happen - if Dorothea would ever realize that she loved Will, if Lydgate would ever manage to out connive his wife, if Fred would ever pull his life together to make it with Mary. Many in our discussions on the book have mentioned that they feel the need to reread this book, and I agree (though I definitely want to read it in print and not as an ebook). If you're a fan of Victorian novels, but haven't read this one yet, go for it! And join us in August for our last discussion and tell us what you think.