Summer Reading with Mona Simpson: Middlemarch, An Invitation
Some of the best conversations I’ve had about literature—and for that matter, about life—have been in small classrooms, talking very specifically about something we’ve all just read. For me, as an adult, and for many of my friends, those talks are what we missed most about college in grown up life and what we tried, with mixed results, to replicate. Even if one makes bookish friends, chances are what I’m reading now, one of my friends will have read five years ago and will be on another friend’s bedside table.
I’ve been following the Substack discussions George Saunders began, reading short stories with slow, relishing attention. They’re such a marvel. What’s so lovely and exceptional about these discussions are the large community they’ve engendered to go deeply into every movement, every escalation of the story.
Still, being a lover of the long enveloping novel, I find myself—as a reader and a writer—yearning for this kind of patient discussion about a major orchestral novel. There are structural issues to consider, patternings on a different scale, braidings of story lines. Most of all, novels account for and mimic the nature of time itself. While short stories deliver revelations, sharp startling epiphanies, novels chronicle the nature of internal movement, one step forward, two steps back, and take us through our own incremental changes of mind.
I thought it would a great experiment to look at a novel the way Saunders addresses the short story canon. I wanted to start with Middlemarch, a novel I’ve taught several times, always with great pleasure, often to undergraduate students, some of whom have never read a whole nineteenth-century novel.
Let’s start slowly, one chapter at a time.
Our first installment, considering Middlemarch, Chapter One, will go out to Book Post Summer Reading subscribers on Sunday, June 4. Meet me here for conversation in the comments.
Book Post’s bookselling partner Tertulia is kindly offering Summer Reading participants a 25 percent discount on the pair of Middlemarch and my new novel, Commitment. Subscribe to receive the offer.
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Mona Simpson is the author of seven novels, most recently Commitment, which appeared this spring.
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Where can I find th schedule for this?
Ann, I loved reading To The LIghthouse together, including the dense discussion in the ongoing chat. However, I found the Zoom distracting with so many people putting lengthy comments into the chat. I'm wondering if there's a way for us to chime in at the beginning--say where we're from, etc.--and then restrict the chat so that we can pose brief questions to you and Mona, but keep the focus on what Mona is saying. Just a thought.