True confessions: I own a copy of Middlemarch, and I think I read the entire thing -- it's a friend's favorite book, and I read it because of her -- but I don't remember the plot or anything else, really, about the book. So there's no real reason why I should have started or kept at this book, except that I read a New Yorker essay that Mead wrote about the pandemic, and one link led to another, until I was borrowing the eBook version of this from the library.

This was a light and easy way for me to learn more about George Eliot. The fairly random musings of this book -- about everything from Victorian mindsets to Mead's private life -- fit my current attention span. Mead describes locations in the U.K. well, and I had planned to travel to England and Scotland this summer, so I appreciated those literary excursions. I'm not sure any of Mead's claims about Middlemarch or Eliot necessarily hold up to scholarly scrutiny, but I was engaged with them. Do children experience emotions more intensely than adults? Does the landscape of a person's childhood have power because it's "where we learned to be human"? Can literature teach us empathy for all people? And, to Mead's wider point, does every reader have a touchstone book that matters most to them? I can't say that I do, but I wish that I did. Maybe.