Middlemarch

I was a little surprised when my esteemed colleague from Tejas suggested we read George Eliot's classic.  I didn't know a whole lot about the book when we began.  I think I mentally lumped it together with "the Jane's" -- Jane Eyre and Jane Austen -- simply because these were British female authors of roughly the same era.  And I very vaguely remember disliking the Jane's as sort of soap-opera-y.  As it turns out Eliot was born after Austen died.  A while it's true that she and Brontë were contemporaries, and one could indeed call Middlemarch a kind of soap opera ... I rather enjoyed it. 

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the book was its dry English sense of humor.  There are not merely many droll comments from the narrator, but some wonderfully sarcastic dialogue that must have been hilarious in the original 19th-century English, but comes through fine even in translation.  Beyond that, there is also a lot of perceptive and even wise psychological observation.  Eliot only rarely provides any 'realistic' detail about settings and dress and the way the light glimmered in her father's eye on that dappled afternoon in the ... etc ... etc ...  Instead, she provides something I consider much closer to reality by ignoring all this setting and delving deeply into the psychology of each character.  We see their strengths and flaws in such clear light that we almost feel as if we're reading non-fiction, a case study where all the characters simply did what they had to do, given who they are.  If most soap operas rose to this level, I would certainly watch more TV.