Recently I've finally started reading Middlemarch. The two people I love best in all the world, Jos and Nicole, are both big ol' proponents of the middlest of Marches, Middlemarch, but for one reason or another I've never gotten round to reading it (nor any George Eliot whatsoever, until Jos sent me a PDF of that bonkers short story she wrote about candymaking and slavery and guilt last year). There's a big old Victorian gap in my reading history, where I just sort of BLOOP over most of Trollope and Thackeray and Shaw, and confine myself mainly to yelling about hating Lord Alfred Douglas over and over. I like MacDonald, OBVIOUSLY, Rose La Touche aside, and I've always given Hardy a dodge, probably unfairly, because I assume he's going to be a massive bummer, so I've really just coasted on a little bit of Shaw and Haggard and the ordinary-public-school Dickens and Gaskell and the so-obvious-they-hardly-bear-mentioning Brontës.