Middlemarch and War and Peace

Middlemarch was a tough book to read. Eliot is an amazing writer, as far as getting into the minds of the characters with complex and beautiful phrasing and intricate and philosophical conjectures, but it is not easy to comprehend her sentences without concentration. The ending was a bit too much of a "happy ever after" type of ending, but I would rate George Eliot as being one of the very best writers ever, next to all the other greats.

War and Peace, after reading the first 400 pages, is turning out to be great. It is easy to see how much easier life is for people today, given the level of medical care and so forth. The battle descriptions are cool and the characters are complicated and not cliches.

So far my resolution to watch no tv or movies is going well. I have the time to read heavy literature.