Answers to Frequently Asked Questions
What's your own favourite book?
Middlemarch by George Eliot. Oddly perhaps, Eliot is not my favourite writer, although she's probably in my top ten. But I find her Middlemarch endlessly interesting. It's got that widescreen presentation of a community, an entire society, so typical of nineteenth-century novels. It has wonderful characters who strike strange chords in me. It's intellectually provocative and enlightened, all in a page-turning narrative.
I could go on and on without telling you anything that could not be said equally of a dozen other modern classics: Les Misérables, David Copperfield, Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Jones, Vanity Fair, Tess of the D'Urbervilles....
But, for some reason I cannot quite put into words, Middlemarch does it all for me.
See also:
Selected Authors: Commentaries
How the Greatest Literature was selected
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