Last week, I happened on a tweet from Patrick Collison (co-founder of Stripe and the excellent Stripe Press) reflecting on the ten classic “triple-decker” novels that he’d just finished reading:
This year, I read ten important historical novels: Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, To The Lighthouse, Bleak House, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina, Life and Fate, Heart of Darkness, Madame Bovary, and The Magic Mountain… For me the clear standouts are Middlemarch, Bleak House, Karenina, and Life and Fate. I would enthusiastically reread any of them. If I had to choose just one to go to again, I would probably select Middlemarch. There’s something memorably compelling in Eliot’s affection and empathy for almost all of her characters. If Succession is a show with no likable personalities, Middlemarch is the opposite. Bleak House is a close second.
His ranking more or less aligns with mine: of the hundred or so novels from the 19th and 20th century that I read during my grad school days, my favorites were Middlemarch and Bleak House, and Middlemarch is the one book that I try to re-read once a decade.
This is, I realize, not a particularly contrarian take—Middlemarch regularly tops lists of English-language novels. But of course ranking novels is inevitably a subjective game, and less important than the question that Collison raises later in his tweet essay, which is why we should read classic novels at all.
Pleasure aside, should one read these books? Does one derive moral betterment from doing so? I’m not sure. Probably not in any narrow sense. Ethicists are supposedly no more ethical than regular people – if deliberate study doesn’t help, what hope does mere fiction have? And, anecdotally, I don’t consider the humanities majors to be the moral betters of the STEM students. I do think they’ve helped with my understanding of history, though.