Even More Not Reading

Yet another book for the not-reading report.  I made it 55 pages into George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner.  And I’m done.  It’s not because I don’t like Eliot.  I enjoyed The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Adam Bede.  The writing is deft and often lovely.

For example, I offer this quote:  “All cleverness, whether in the rapid use of that difficult instrument the tongue, or in some other art unfamiliar to villagers, was in itself suspicious:  honest folk, born and bred in a visible manner, were mostly not overwise or clever—at least not beyond such a matter as knowing the signs of the weather; and the process by which rapidity and dexterity of any kind were acquired was so wholly hidden, that they partook of the nature of conjuring.” (p. 12)  It’s well-observed and clearly expressed.

 

Or this one, on the village of Raveloe and its culture:  “Raveloe lay low among the bushy trees and the rutted lanes, aloof from the currents of industrial energy and Puritan earnestness:  the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families, and the poor thought that the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly life; besides, their feasting caused a multiplication of orts, which were the heirlooms of the poor.”  (p. 36-37)

 

So why am I not finishing?  I don’t like the characters.  Silas is a sad old miser, disappointed in love and faith.  The local squire’s sons are disagreeable fellows.  No one is going to come to a good end and I just don’t want to read through it.