Who recommends it
- James MustichInterview
Middlemarch by George Eliot. I read it for the first time when I was in college and have read it in each of the four decades since. At 19, it seemed to be the wisest book I’d ever read, and my sense of its wisdom has only grown as my experience expanded. The narrative voice is animated by a combination of…
- Rebecca GoldsteinInterview
I have two quite different careers, as a philosopher and as a novelist. It’s easier to assign three books for the first. They would be The Republic by Plato, Meditations on First Philosophy by Descartes, and Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume. As far as becoming a novelist, I have no specific…
- Keith FrankishInterview
It sounds pretentious, but I must mention Shakespeare. Again, I discovered him for myself in my teens, reading a facsimile of the First Folio which my dad bought me. I love seeing Shakespeare’s plays on stage, but more than anything I love his language, his outrageous, breath-taking skill with words, and I read him a…
- Rob KutnerInterview
Middlemarch by George Eliot. My wife! She kept exclaiming how good it was, and calling it her “favorite novel.” My wife is a tough cookie, so that’s like a 200% on Rotten Tomatoes from her.
- Melissa LaneInterview
Middlemarch by George Eliot, as an anatomy of how the tiny choices that we make in everyday moments – which way we lean, as it were – add up to what looks like fate or destiny.
- George MonbiotInterview
Middlemarch by George Eliot, Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy…
- Kayla Rae WhitakerInterview
Continuing my “classics I’ve missed” tear: Middlemarch by George Eliot is on the list, as is Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Resting at the top of my TBR list:
- Angie HobbsInterview
Perhaps Middlemarch by George Eliot. She has such clear-eyed understanding of and compassion for such a huge cast of characters and their moral predicaments and complicated emotional responses. And as well as her grasp of intense romantic passion, she also has a great grasp of the importance of work, business and…
- Tom PriceInterview
Probably Middlemarch by George Eliot because I spent an entire summer trying to get through it in order to be ready for an Oxford entrance exam. I hated every second of that book, lost loads of time in which I could have been reading for pleasure, and failed to get into Oxford. Instead I went to Warwick and got my…
- Tim AtkinInterview
- Laura SnyderInterview
Books that have been important to me in some way would have to include Middlemarch by George Eliot, anything by Anthony Trollope, The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Waterland by Graham Swift. In non-fiction, The Great Bridge by David McCullough, Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel, and…
Often recommended alongside
War and Peace
The Republic
Jane Eyre
Symposium
A Dance to the Music of Time
Madame Bovary
Love in the Time of Cholera
Life After LifeMore books by George Eliot our guests recommend
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