On Monday I left Middlemarch at work, so I started For the Thrill of It, the story of Leopold and Loeb. It's very good! But I went back yesterday to pick up Middlemarch, and last night returned to the painful story of Rosamond and Tertius. I only recently realized I picture the exquisite Rosamund Pike as the poisonously poised Rosamond Vincy, and it's not just the similarity in their first names. Rosamond Vincy is like Pike's character in Gone Girl: perfect at appearing the way you want to see her. "Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own."

Even in tense moments, her beauty serves to distract and soothe. "As she came towards him in her drapery of transparent faintly-tinted muslin, her slim yet round figure never looked more graceful [...] her delicate neck and cheek and purely-cut lips never had more of that untarnished beauty which touches us in spring-time and infancy and all sweet freshness." She'll never directly contradict you (that would be unladylike), the only indicator that she will thwart you at every turn is a "little turning aside of [her] long neck." And she always gets her way.

Eliot's making a point about marriage: partnerships that begin with beautiful illusions based only loosely in reality end in bitterness and alienation: "Just as clearly in the miserable light she saw her own and her husband's solitude -- how they walked apart so that she was obliged to survey him." Better to be uncomfortably familiar with the faults and short-comings of your partner than to jump into a relationship that seems perfect, and that you imagine will only get better.

Merry Christmas from Middlemarch, where lines like this abide:

"To an aunt who does not recognise her infant nephew as Bouddha, and has nothing to do for him but to admire, his behavior is apt to appear monotonous, and the interest of watching him exhaustible."

Times do exist when it's a relief not to be with my father's family for the holidays, where there are more babies than space in my brain to recall their names. I like how in old books they just refer to infants as "baby." Not by name and not by "the baby," just "baby." Let's bring that back.

Recently my abuse of books was made note of, namely by Howard, in relation to a copy of Geek Love we'd borrowed from his friends. Oops! I have a different philosophy around books. Unlike my possessive thirteen-year-old self, keeping the spine of a book pristine is no longer an important indicator of self-restraint and intelligence.

I bring whatever I'm reading everywhere I go, which means they are shoved into bags, slung over a shoulder, and often jostled while I'm biking. With my own books I mark my progress with a series of dog-eared pages, underlines, dashes, comments, and (infrequently) hearts. I love the physicality of books, and the interaction a reader has with it. I don't know that I'd ever really enjoy an e-reader, because I want to enact my life onto the book.

And still there's a part of myself that feels guilty, like I may be defacing a work of art, or making a note I will later find pathetic, immature, or silly.

This morning I read Dorothea's description of what comforts her: "That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil -- widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower." When Will tried to give it a name, she stopped him. Don't try and define it, it's my life, she said. What a beautiful book I'm reading.

I went into work and my supervisor sat me down to tell me that sometimes I was a "dark cloud over the department." It's so frustrating, the disconnect between how I feel about life when I'm reading and the life that I experience. I want to be more like the good people in Middlemarch, but I end up by being me, the worst parts of me pointed out today--impatient, snappish, and bossy where I have no authority to be so.

Although maybe I'm not terribly different from Dorothea. After all, this exchange between the Brooke sisters sounded quite a bit like the one I had at work:

"You mean that I am very impatient, Celia."

"Yes; when people don't do and say just what you like."

I'll try and be better.

"[He] had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying."

When I started reading, I kept running into these wispy pen marks, left by the ex-lover who gave me the book. I'm not sure he finished the book, as his marginalia have completely disappeared.

I miss their company.

I am loving Middlemarch. Seriously, it's like poetry. The other night I read two pages and had to put the book down, I was like "enough, seriously, stop." It's dense and rich, like mince pie, nearly every page has some Truth. Almost lost it though, when I went to the AIDS Foundation World of Chocolate with Amber and left it at coat check.

Yesterday I held Middlemarch in my hands, because I didn't want our hosts to think it necessary to entertain me while they worked, but the topic of Taylor Swift's new album interrupted Fred Vincy's musings on Bulstrode. Then later, when Featherstone's oppression weighed on his mind, the subject of the rioters broke in, as it inevitably would. Today it snowed while we visited the arch and a quirky flower shop for the autumnal decorations. Both were beautiful, impressive, and made me feel good about the world.

I didn't read anything yesterday because my eyes hurt, my head hurt, my whole body wanted to be unconscious. We were out very late for Howard's birthday Saturday.

Before I knew anything about Middlemarch, a coworker shrugged and told me it was all about "English ladies and dresses," which now that I'm seven chapters in strikes me as a rather reductive summing up of the book.

That being said, I do like Celia a lot, who is purring and blonde, not a deep thinker, practical and direct, and enjoys pretty things. Dorothea is like Margery Kempe--hysterically sobbing with religious fervor over organ music. Jessie wrote an essay on women crying for religious reasons: I think the thesis was that it was one expression of faith people couldn't control. Watching Dorothea make her choice is like watching an animal walk into a trap, and I imagine her mind will be like one of those pigs in gestation crates. Everyone around is her is like: "Whelp, it could be worse, I guess."

Yesterday Howard brought me breakfast in bed on a tray, and next to the plate was Middlemarch. My edition (Everyman) starts with a chronology of her life and an introduction to the text. The chronology was mostly a list of the famous people who died as her life was starting, but got increasingly dramatic with the third and fourth cholera pandemic, and a little note from when she was 37 and told her family about her relationship with a married man, which ended in her being cut off. Two years later her sister died of tuberculosis.

I like reading my own book because I can write in it. Every page in the first chapter has something worth marking.