https://authz.ca/worth-reading/fiction/Recent content in Fiction on AuthZHugoen-CAhttps://authz.ca/worth-reading/fiction/frankenstein/Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0700https://authz.ca/worth-reading/fiction/frankenstein/<h3 id="why-read-it">Why Read It</h3> <p><em>Frankenstein</em> is worth reading for the questions it asks about creation and responsibility. Mary Shelley’s later account of how she began it offers something else: permission to take an idea seriously before knowing what it will become.</p>https://authz.ca/worth-reading/fiction/middlemarch/Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0700https://authz.ca/worth-reading/fiction/middlemarch/<h3 id="why-read-it">Why Read It</h3> <p>Some novels enlarge a life by making other lives harder to simplify. <em>Middlemarch</em> is one of them.</p> <p>George Eliot’s characters want meaningful lives. They want love, work, recognition, usefulness, security, change. They also misunderstand themselves, choose badly, disappoint one another, and discover that the world is larger and less manageable than they thought. Eliot can be sharply funny about these failures, but she rarely leaves a character as merely an object of ridicule. She stays close enough for us to see why a choice made sense at the time—and far enough away for us to see what that choice costs.</p>