Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Miss Manners' favorite novels

Judith Martin, also known as Miss Manners, is a syndicated columnist and the author of Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Freshly Updated.

In 2005 she named her five favorite novels for the Wall Street Journal.

One title on the list:
"Middlemarch" by George Eliot (1872)
by George Eliot (1872).

The Intellectual Groupie at the center of this novel illustrates how the homely, cranky old scholar gets the girl and what happens when she discovers that he is not even all that smart. We have here the definitive portrait of pedantry, so in addition to making you feel relieved that your favorite professor failed to respond to your crush, it reassures you that--unlike the crushingly boring bridegroom--you were right not to attempt writing, or even to finish reading, an exhaustive work that explains the universe.
Read about another novel on the list.

Middlemarch also made John Mullan's lists of ten of the best marital rows, ten of the best examples of unrequited love, and ten of the best funerals in literature, as well as Tina Brown's five best list of books on reputation.

--Marshal Zeringue