no more excuses

I finished a book today.

Why is this significant, you ask?

Well, I’ll tell you. Because I haven’t read a real book since… the summer, I think.
Oh, sure. I read lots of things for class. Things on politics, literary criticism, book upon book about the U.S.-Mexico border. But all those were for school. They don’t count as real books. Those things get filed away with various pieces of information I hold in my head, ready to use at any moment I feel it is necessary to know how Coleridge divides the imagination into three parts, how immigration patterns in Texas have change dramatically in the last one hundred years, or how Darfur isn’t really the biggest crisis in Sudan.

[As a sidenote, I also read the Twilight books. These do not fall in the 'real books' category for reasons to be enumerated at a later date.]

By real books, I mean things that one reads simply for the love of reading. Things one reads to learn about life, themselves, the author, or any number of dangerously interesting subjects.

The book I finished is The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot.

Gasp. Shock. Jaws drop.

Yes. I did it. I finished my first Eliot novel. A short one, I’ll grant, but I finished it, nonetheless.

And you know what? I liked it. In fact, I loved it. That’s right, LOVE.

It’s a story of a young girl attempting to be society’s definition of good and perfect and virtuous, but her outgoing, rambunctious, perfectly sweet nature gets in the way. She accidentally loses control of emotion on occasion. Young girls hoping to marry should never lose control. Sometimes she makes rash decisions like chopping off her hair and falling in love with forbidden boys. Oops.

But through it all, the heroine, Maggie, cannot be anything but loved. One can’t help appreciating the real-ness in her. We all make mistakes. We all make terrible decisions. Some of us even struggle with the definitions of ‘right’ and ‘good’.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, but I will say that I experienced a HUGE range of emotion as I read the last sentences. I hoped there was more, and yet begged for an end.






Guess I have to start my paper now.