Eliot, George. Middlemarch (1872). New York: Washington Square P, 1963.

This novel is greater than most others I've ever read. It deals with money, law, medicine, religion/the clergy, inheritance, property, farming, railroads, love, gypsies, and more and more and more. It is the exact wrong novel to read in a week's time.

Comparable books to this I've read include:

• Infinite Jest
• Gravity's Rainbow

(I haven't had a lot of time to devote to supremely dense and long novels.)

At any rate, I can't imagine poring through these with flashing, quick, unthinking eyes, looking only for the What of each page, and missing all the How and Why. Causaubon is impotent, turns out. And how delicately insinuated!

There's so much one misses in and about a book when one reads it in one's PhD program.