Interestingly, I've tried to read Middlemarch twice, and still haven't gotten through it all the way. But I'm still not forty, so there's hope.
(Whereas, for the same college course, I read The Portrait of a Lady, and completely failed to relate to Isabel's clucking over the minutiae of her marriage, and my professor told me, "Re-read this book when you've been married." I haven't, so I haven't.)
Many of the novels I read in childhood, adolescence, and college are books I have felt the need to re-read. Usually these aren't "books I loved" -- many of those will not stand a re-read, if I am to continue to love them -- but books I have felt the need to grow into. To Kill a Mockingbird (to cite an example currently in the New Yorker) is one book when you're a tomboyish twelve, and another entirely when you're a depressive, solitary thirty. I expect it to be yet a third book if I ever spend any length of time in the Deep South.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-08-08 05:47 pm (UTC)(Whereas, for the same college course, I read The Portrait of a Lady, and completely failed to relate to Isabel's clucking over the minutiae of her marriage, and my professor told me, "Re-read this book when you've been married." I haven't, so I haven't.)
Many of the novels I read in childhood, adolescence, and college are books I have felt the need to re-read. Usually these aren't "books I loved" -- many of those will not stand a re-read, if I am to continue to love them -- but books I have felt the need to grow into. To Kill a Mockingbird (to cite an example currently in the New Yorker) is one book when you're a tomboyish twelve, and another entirely when you're a depressive, solitary thirty. I expect it to be yet a third book if I ever spend any length of time in the Deep South.