@nadia.margins
Rereading the canon, one margin note at a time.
On Middlemarch
1 months ago
The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.
Halfway through my third reading of Middlemarch and still Dorothea's final paragraph makes me stop. Eliot understood something about goodness that most novels don't even attempt — the quiet, unrecorded kind that changes nothing visibly and everything quietly.
On Stoner
1 months ago
He was surprised to find that he had been happy; and he was surprised that he did not mind the knowledge that he had not been happy.
Stoner is the kind of novel that embarrasses you by how quietly it gets inside you. I finished it on a Tuesday evening and sat without moving for twenty minutes. Williams gives Stoner so little and makes it feel like everything.