Sunday, July 22, 2012

I'm Currently Reading...The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (Part 1)



 This is the version I'm reading.



Currently reading: The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Reason: I really liked Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, and I’d like to study what else she’s written.

  Book One: Boy and Girl: The story begins by describing the Floss, and then Dorlcote Mill, the main scene for the whole story.  I didn’t really consider (for some reason) that George Eliot wrote a lot of provincial novels like this one, but she did - like Adam Bede and Silas Marner.  In my head her literature was more like Charles Dickens or William Makepeace Thackeray and although her later stories that I read were more like that, her writing is much more soft and easy to understand than I thought.  This story, so far, reminds me of Little Women where it has foreshadowing and hefty descriptions of things, but contains a lot of dialogue for most of the book.  

  At the beginning we’re introduced to Mr. And Mrs. Tulliver, who have decided to send Tom (a young lad of 13)  to study at a different school.  Maggie, a high spirited young girl of 9 years old, has missed her brother terribly, and they are very close.  One thing I’ve noticed when reading it is that it seems like Tom does things to purposely get Maggie upset, and then Maggie gets in trouble.  Maggie though is VERY dramatic and impulsive (I mean, she cuts off all of her own hair when her family is talking about how pretty her cousin Lucy’s hair is).  I find them kind of irritating as children, so I hope they get better as they get older.  

    Anyway, Maggie and Tom have lots of adventures while he is home from school, including Maggie’s escape to the Gypsies down the road when Tom is paying more attention to  Lucy and not her.  That was pretty hilarious.  I’m expecting something really bad to happen to one of them in the upcoming chapters.  It’s like Eliot is just hinting at something, enough for you pick up on it but not clearly enough to know what it is.

  This is going to take me awhile to finish I think, even though it is only 500 some pages, because I'm working on a craft swap project on the American Girl Playthings Board, as well as practicing the piano and getting ready for my first year of college (YIKES).

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