Adam Bede by George Eliot

George Eliot (aka Marian Evans) was so far ahead of her contemporaries. Her realist novels read as if they had been written a hundred years later. Of course, she skirts around some of the more difficult subjects in Adam Bede: the relations between Hetty and Arthur are only hinted at, and the murder of the child is related after the fact.

But her characterizations are so much more realistic than anything that Dickens produced it is hard to even draw a comparison. Pip seems a caricature next to Adam Bede. And all of Dickens' female characters lack the depth of a Hetty or even a Mrs. Poyser from Adam Bede.

An excellent novel, well worth reading again and again.

George Eliot: The Last Victorian by Kathryn Hughes

An excellent biography of a fascinating author. Mary Ann Evans, or Marian Evans, or Marian Lewes, or Marian Evans Lewes Cross, or George Eliot: the profusion of names gives you a hint of how complicated her life was. In a time when divorce was difficult (if not impossible), she lived happily with a married man for decades. Her life is as complex as the characters in her novels, and this biography deals with the details without obscuring the big picture.

After reading it, I wish that I had know her, which is the ultimate proof that this biography works.

Then Came the Evening by Brian Hart

A dark, somber, moody novel, but expertly written. It tells the tale of a shattered family: the father in prison for murder, the mother hitting rock bottom, the 20 year-old son never knowing his father. Things really get going when the father gets out of prison and the son attempts to bring the family together on the deceased grandparent's old ranch. But the father cannot change, the mother's guilt is overpowering, and the son grows away from them, forming new bonds.

What is disturbing is the cavalier attitude of the father toward murder. He is not a psychopath, or even even disturbed - he seems perfectly normal, yet thinks nothing of shooting a policeman, for instance.

Despite the dark tone, it is an excellent book, well written.