Middlemarch

Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. It is the story of a provincial town in the years before the Reform Act: a young woman who marries a dry old scholar because she wants to do some good in the world, a brilliant young doctor who marries the mayor's pretty daughter, a banker with a past, and a hundred people talking about all of them. It came out in eight parts across 1871 and 1872, and it is best read the same way, slowly, in its books. Eighty-eight chapters, one a day, from Eliot's birthday through the winter.

Read one big book alongside other readers, a day at a time. Cohorts set off on the date above.