I have been reading literature my whole life, literature, not fiction, though I read that too.  I read with a Patreon group called the Hardcore Literature Book Club.  We are currently in the middle of Homer’s Odyssey,  having just finished Dumas’ Three Musketeers.

HLBC has a staggering back catalog of lectures, under each which is a members’ discussion forum that is a sheer joy.  Sometimes months or years later someone will go in there and reply to a post you wrote, which brings back lovely memories.

About George Eliot’s Middlemarch I had written that I think it is the finest English novel ever written, slightly edging Dickens and Austen.  In particular I noted the last line.  So often we discuss famous first lines - Anna Karenina, A Tale of Two Cities - but never the last.  This one is just magnificent, about the main character:

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”

So beautiful, so true, makes me cry.  Saints and angels walk among us.