Middlemarch, eleven weeks, no regrets
I started this in October as a project and finished it in the first week of January, reading twenty or thirty pages most evenings. That pace turns out to suit it. The book is built out of many small movements and rewards being lived alongside rather than sprinted through.
It is a novel about a provincial town in which several people make irreversible choices before they know enough to make them, and then have to keep living in the same streets as the results. A clever young woman marries a man she takes for a great scholar. An idealistic doctor arrives with reforms and a talent for underestimating debt. A young man expects an inheritance. None of these are surprises to the reader; all of them are surprises to the characters, and the gap between those two facts is where the book operates.
What I did not expect was the narrator. She is present, opinionated, and generous, and she keeps stepping forward to say, in effect, that the person you have just judged deserves better than your judgement. There is a famous passage about the fact that everyone is the centre of their own account of things, and that our failure to feel other people's lives as vividly as our own is a kind of merciful stupidity. I underlined most of it, which I do not normally do in a hardback.
There is one storyline about a will and a family fortune that could lose a hundred pages and I would not miss them. And Dorothea's second act moves faster than her first, which after that much patient setup feels slightly rushed.
But the marriage chapters are among the best things I have read on the subject: not dramatic betrayals, just two people discovering by degrees that they had been describing different futures with the same words.
If you have been circling this one for years, my only advice is to give it a fixed slow schedule and not a holiday sprint. It is not difficult. It is just long, and it is better when it has room.