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.