I should add contemporaries:

▪️ Wizard of the Crow, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
▪️ A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
▪️ Preparation for the Next Life, Atticus Lish
▪️ The Wrong End of the Telescope, Rabih Alameddine
▪️ Vagabonds, Hao Jingfang
▪️ A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James
▪️ Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders
▪️ Record of a Spaceborn Few, Becky Chambers

Ugh. You see? There're too many good books. This isn't an easy question! We need each another if we're ever to read them all. 😭

@MLClark Beautiful list(s). Brothers K and Middlemarch are right up there for me as well. For much of my life I think I *was* Dorothea. Can't believe I've never read The Name of the Rose...

@LiseL Ohhhh I knew we were bosom friends, as Anne would say. :)

Yes, Dorothea is someone I resonated with myself (to my horror!). The worst part is that, as a wee'un, I could ID all the people who would "Exactly right" me in ways I knew weren't genuine - but they aren't easily escaped! So how does one *not* try to lean into something that feels truer to that inner integrity burning for expression?

😅 Ah life. In that and Mill on the Floss, I think Eliot was writing characters true to her too.

@LiseL The Name of the Rose is such a thoroughly sincere effort to imagine the past as it would have been experienced by people at the time. There are few historical works that do quite as good a job of full, credulous immersion into another way of perceiving the world, but Nicola Griffith's Hild is certainly up there. (I just wish she'd resisted an anachronism: a quote by Atwood that doesn't belong in the era.) Another by her, Spear, just won the Bradbury Prize but I haven't read it yet.

@MLClark Sold. I'll read it this summer -- after I'm finished reading your novels, of course!

@LiseL Oooo, @ me when it hits the top of your list! I would love to revisit it as well. 🤗

@MLClark Agree, agree, agree! They certainly aren't easy to escape: I've also been Emily Brontë (because writers are characters too), since I was 15, sigh and lol. Mill on the Floss is definitely Eliot's most autobiographical novel. Hmmmm, I'd love to know what you think of Daniel Deronda. In fact, if you ever write about Eliot, do please let me know!

@LiseL !!! You've read Deronda too! 💫 ❤️ Oh my 19th-century-lit-scholar heart is all aflutter.

Deronda is such an important book for thinking about identity formation: easily one of the most nuanced attempts to understand the self in relation to ideas of obligation to others. All hugely informed by anxieties of empire at the time, which made her negotiation of Judaism even more striking. (Dickens, in contrast, often leaned into Orientalist anxieties in his portrayals.) What struck you about it?

@MLClark So much. I guess mainly her effort to see into the heart of mystical Judaism and her interest in Zionism. As you say, really extraordinary for the times, even more so given her own fraught relationship with religion. I don't think it was particularly well received at the time. Daniel's mentor/therapist relationship to Gwendolyn also stands out as being extraordinary. Like Middlemarch, so unique, and so unlike anything that came before it.

@LiseL Or after! I didn't mention in my list, but Jude the Obscure holds a painful place in my heart as well; I sorely feel for Hardy giving up on novels for poetry due to the toxic response he received for writing nuanced explorations of how unjust social contexts bind us to life outcomes made crueller by our capacity to imagine other ways things might have been.

In a better world, Daniel Deronda would've inspired a whole wealth of works in dialogue with its ideas. A shame we didn't get that.

@MLClark

Yes, what happened with Hardy was tragic.

Eliot was highly sensitive to criticism - Lewes tried his best to protect her from it so she would continue to write - but I don't know if her last work, the experimental or pre-modernist Impressions of Theophrastus Such (which I haven't read) was in any way a reaction to any controversy around DD. Hmmm.

And I also wonder what she would have written after that, had she lived?

@LiseL 💛 Oh, such brilliant lines of inquiry! We have *so* much to return to as literary excuses allow. I want to pick your brain (& heart!) about many related topics!

I'm diving into writing now, but what a joy of a chat, Lise. 😊 Thank you for this gift of a deep dive into how the classics continue to affect us here and now. Whatever reading you've got on the go these days, I only hope it's a tenth as thought-provoking as all the gems above.

Happiest of weekends, beautiful you! 🕊️

@MLClark Thank you for your thoughts (as always) and your excellent book recommendations. And any time you want to time travel to the 19th or 24th centuries, you know where to find me... 😂 Happy writing!

@MLClark @LiseL I have mixed feelings about Daniel Deronda, but yes to Jude the Obscure. And of course DH Lawrence.

@Notokay I hear you. I Ioved Daniel Deronda, but I do see its flaws. Mirah's a little too saint-like for my taste. Some parts read a little too much like an essay on Judaism, and I see why some readers might feel like it's two novels unsuccessfully woven into one. But I could easily forgive the flaws when there were so many strengths -- imho!

@MLClark
War and Peace
The Brothers K (though I have a real fondness for The Idiot)
Middlemarch (but all of Eliot)
Pride and Prejudice (all of Austen)
Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake
Orlando (most of Woolf)
All of Nabokov
All of Clarice Lispector
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Petals of Blood
Possession

@MLClark Oh dear, you've opened up a can of worms here. My top three are probably:
*The Master and Margarita by MIkhail Bulgakov (barely beating out The Brothers K for favorite Russian novel)
*Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (which has its problematic moments, as I think we've discussed before)
*Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
The Name of the Rose is up there in my heart as a former medievalist.
Poetry is a different matter, and a different list.

@stephen_a_allen Oh, The Master and Margarita is a WONDERFUL contender for top prize. What a brilliant juxtaposition of narrative constructs - so rich in discourse that every reader seems to come out with a different interpretation of what is being deconstructed, what condemned, & what remade. As good lit should do!

:) I will look forward to that poetry list in due course!

(Your email was a lovely gift this week, BTW. Thank you for that joy. Reply forthcoming - but gratitude in abundance now!)