Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English. Mead has discovered an original and highly personal way to make herself an inhabitant both of the book and of George Eliot's imaginary city. Though I have read and taught the book these many years I find myself desiring to go back to it after reading Rebecca Mead's work.

We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.

If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.

I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential.

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.