BOOKS

Middlemarch_9780143107729

Curator Reviews

Gary Shteyngart

If you like British stuff and are confused by life, this is the book for you.

View Gary Shteyngart's Top 10 Favorite Books
Andrew Solomon

This book has the virtue of being the most perfect novel ever written. It manages to blend the miniature world of an uninteresting town with a profound reckoning with the human heart in all its vagaries. Here we find courage, pettiness, self-deception, love, profundity, triviality, sadness, joy, munificence, greed, theatricality, restraint, wit, pomposity, despair, hope. It’s seductively readable, free of pretension, and written with a rare clear-eyed kindness.

View Andrew Solomon's Top 10 Favorite Books
Bret Easton Ellis

It took me too long to appreciate the subtlety and vision of Eliot [pen name for Mary Ann Evans] and the slow-burning pleasures of her storytelling. The rapturous intensity (and specificity) of the prose is formally stunning and deeply pleasurable.

View Bret Easton Ellis's Top 10 Favorite Books
Gary Shteyngart

If you like British stuff and are confused by life, this is the book for you.

View Gary Shteyngart's Top 10 Favorite Books
Greta Gerwig

Glorious, sprawling, generous. It makes you wish you had not judged characters so quickly and that you could grow old with all of them. I read somewhere that it is a novel for adults, and it is, truly. It is a book I hope to read at every decade of my life, because I think each time it will have something new to teach me.

View Greta Gerwig's Top 10 Favorite Books
Nigella Lawson

Despite its grand place in the literary canon, “Middlemarch” is really a rich, gossipy boxed set of a novel. I first read this as a teenager in short bursts nightly with a torch after lights-out, and it gripped me like a soap opera. The foolishness of the human condition, the urgency of its whims and fancies, and the often blinding need to find meaning are unsparingly chronicled in this feast of a book.

View Nigella Lawson's Top 10 Favorite Books
Mary Gordon

The character of Dorothea Brooke, a gifted woman whose gifts are thwarted by the possibilities available to her, yet who flourishes despite it because of the greatness of her character, the depiction of a woman of passion and intelligence, the tracing of disillusionment in love and marriage—Middlemarch accomplishes all this while creating a vivid world of politics, community, and landscape.

View Mary Gordon's Top 10 Favorite Books