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This is the best book ever written, and why would you even think that? Who cares? It seems like a particularly male thing to do, this categorizing, this ranking. When George Eliot introduces Casaubon, a compulsive categorizer who has accomplished nothing of value, it feels like more than a character. It's a warning. She keeps quoting Eve from Paradise Lost, who was impressed by a man and look how that turned out. Eliot's talking about women following men and their dumb, arcane knowledge. Dorothea wants to be part of something grand, and the very idea is patriarchal. She ends up lost in a tomb. This is Casaubon, the archetypal mansplainer: so many facts, so little truth.

So she leads with this grand male ambition, The Key To All Mythologies, but she's heading somewhere else. Here's the quote that she's spending 800 pages aiming for:

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

And you're like oh, fuck yeah, right? Unhistoric acts are my whole jam! This is the truth: most of us will be regular. We can hope to find love, or at least acceptance. We hope that the cumulative effect of very many of us trying to do more or less the right thing will be that the world is more or less nice. A few of us will create great art, or live great lives. Very many of us will wish we had. George Eliot thinks we should settle down.

People are surprised when they find out that I read mostly classics. "What for?" they ask. It sounds boring. "What are you getting out of this?" At its worst, it's some kind of Casaubonesque desire to know everything about something. Better, I hope there's some kind of cumulative effect of empathy and perspective. But best of all: this here, Middlemarch, is the only book I've ever read that changed the way I look at my entire life. It teaches me to settle down. I'm in the process of living faithfully a hidden life here. So perhaps are you. Coming to terms with that isn't just a lesson, it's the lesson, right? It's the whole game. It's either this or buy a convertible and re-pierce my ear. I read classics in hopes of finding something this good again.

Okay so the whole game is in here, and the funny thing about this being the best book ever is that for the best book ever it is fucking boring. There's this whole part, like the middle third or so, that's frankly deadly. It happens about a hundred pages in; you've been having a grand old time with Dorothea and her shitty old husband who can't even fuck right, and all of a sudden Eliot starts introducing new people. It's not that they're not great - well, some of them aren't, I'm sorry but Mary and Fred are boring. But Rosamond! She's so awful! She's terrific and she very nearly runs off with the book. Casaubon is a bad man; Rosamond is a bad woman, and her damage to Lydgate is much worse.

Rosamond is what Eliot started with, in fact; that was supposed to be the book. She was to be a response to the realist landmark Madame Bovary. Eliot decided she needed a counterweight in Dorothea, and then I don't know what all else happened. (That climactic confrontation between Dorothea and Rosamond, for one thing - what a scene, right? Eliot is one of the most compassionate writers, and here's where she puts her money down.) There's this complicated structure she builds - pretty Ladislaw, the banker Bulstrode, an old scandal, some surprisingly Victorian plot twists, given that Middlemarch is itself a realist landmark. Rather more talk about doctors than you needed. A lot of this stuff is boring.

There's a famous quote from Virginia Woolf, who called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." She called it that despite "all its imperfections," by the way, she thought it was boring too. But that's a grown-up message, that bit about the tombs. So here we are, right? Grown-ups, living faithfully our hidden lives, hoping to find peace with our unremarkableness. Here's the peace. You gotta make it through a boring part in the middle, but at the end you'll look back and find it was the best thing ever.