I’ve been rereading Middlemarch for my book club, and wow, what a good decision. Everybody should read Middlemarch and then reread it as often as they can.

I do believe this is the best book the English language has ever produced. But I also recognize that I’ve read very few of the books in the world—every writing workshop I attend reminds me acutely of this fact—so I want to invite you to challenge my claim. But first, let me back it up. Here’s why I think Middlemarch gets GOAT status:

• The writing is incredible. Whether George Eliot is sketching a scene or plunging readers into the heart of any given character, she’s doing it well. She is probably also being funny. I cannot overstate how many passages I have marked up in my copy, intending to learn embroidery so that I can embroider them on throw pillows.

• The setting is specific, but the themes and conflicts are timeless. The novel’s characters live through events that are unique to their provincial English town during the 1830s. Endnotes are helpful for historical context but not necessary to the enjoyment of the story, because the sociopolitical backdrop is secondary to the characters’ more personal dramas: idealism, money problems, frustrated ambitions, hypocrisy, heartache, the sheer unknowability of another person’s mind—everything you and I have seen and felt in our own lives.

• The characters are unforgettable. It’s common to cite Hamlet and Othello as examples of good characterization, because if you swapped them into each other’s plays, you’d have completely different stories. Middlemarch’s characters rise way above this standard: They are comprehensible, consistent, and above all compelling. It’s easy to imagine how their lives might be different if they married different people or lived somewhere else. These are characters upon whom you could base an entirely new zodiac, to be honest.

• The emotions are epic. Middlemarch is a paragon of realist fiction, and it’s easy to conflate the term “realism” with a sort of measured quality, where nothing too unlikely or extreme happens. But commonplace events—like marrying the wrong person or encountering someone unsavory from your past—evoke intense emotions in people all the time. Middlemarch wonderfully explores the mental lives, the interior crises, of numerous characters with an astonishing kind of egalitarianism: Nobody is safe from the narrator’s biting wit, but everyone is worthy of having their hopes and fears and longings and regrets dissected for our pleasure.

Beautifully illustrating my first and last points above is this famous line from Chapter 20:

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

Reading Middlemarch is a bit like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat. We are given supernatural access to the internal lives of so many finely crafted characters. We yearn for the idealists to get what they want and we scorn the dogmatic hypocrites and we hope that everyone who sits somewhere in the middle can learn from experience and find greater happiness. We get to live several lifetimes as we journey through this book—and it’s a pleasure to do so.

So that’s what I mean when I say Middlemarch is the best of all time. But if you’re reading this and shaking your fist at me and saying, “No, Lauren, this other book is the best of all time,” please tell me what that book is. I mean it!

If you are feeling bold, let’s make a wager: Reply to this email with the book that you think is the best in the English language, surpassing all other great novels, even Middlemarch, and I will read that book, hopefully within the next year. If I agree that it’s better, you get to put a “free ad” in the newsletter. Plug a project you’re working on, share a cause you care about, simply write nice things about yourself, whatever you like (up to a certain point, you know).

However, if I read your book and maintain that Middlemarch reigns supreme, you have to read Middlemarch. If you’ve already read it, you have to read it again. This is a great wager for you because either way, you win. And it’s great for me because I will get to read a lot of presumably good books.

So please, send in your contenders. I’m ready to defend George Eliot’s title.

(This wager is only open to subscribers, so if you’re not subscribed yet, you can do that here and then reply to the next newsletter with your suggestion.)

good links

• “It’s the KenTacoHut of emoji” has got to be one of my favorite sentences of the year.

• What David Foster Wallace saw on a luxury cruise. (A gem from 1997 I found in the course of my online pottering. Though I do prefer its original title, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.”)

That’s all, byeeee 🌻