DELETED USER'S comment > Likes and Comments

How do I convert this to a discussion? That was my intention.

I'm not sure you can. If you go to your original post, and select "Edit," there is a check box that makes it either a question or a discussion, I forget which. If it's not a discussion, you may be able to change it there. If not, block and copy your original question into a new topic, make sure it's a discussion, and then I'll block and copy my response, and the rest will be history...

I've checked 'discussion' - I await Goodreads magic!!

You must have read 'Both' beginning with the artist section, as I did. Many who started with the modern section found that it eased the reader into the historical matters. I found the interweaving of the sections intriguing in regard to del Cossa. However some of the novel seems to be clever just for the sake of cleverness, such as having del Cossa observe the people observing his art in the present day. Of course, that could also be read as a testament to the durability of art. I have no quarrel with Smith's research into the art works of that period.
I'm currently reading "A Month in the Country", a short novel by J. L. Carr. It concerns a WWI veteran uncovering/restoring a medieval fresco done by an unknown artist - makes for an interesting counterpoint.

Actually, no, I read the version with the modern story first. The the del Cossa section so engrossed me that I remember little of the modern story.

I have to say that one of the things I enjoy about so many contemporary novels is playing with time. Maybe it's a function of my growing older myself, and find the tricks of memory and the projections of the future interweaving so much in my own mind that makes me open to playing with time.

My library doesn't have A Month in the Country. It does sound interesting. I've rather been avoiding WWI and II books for the past year, having gone through Anthony Powell and William Boyd's Any Human Heart. Tired of war, need a hiatus.

Reading Middlemarch, and have a couch full of library books, not to mention a couple hundred of my own books I have to read. Want to read Calvino this winter, I have two or three of them around here somewhere. Also more Irish writers and more women.

We have far too many books, if such a thing is possible! I have what many consider a bad habit - reading more than one book at a time. I've been jumping in and out of "Middlemarch" for quite awhile. I'm quite fond of the richness of detail in 19th century novels.

See? Memory and mis-remembering. Actually, I'm reading Mansfield Park. But yes, Middlemarch is wonderfully detailed and the characters are rich and believable, and distinctly different, one from another. I actually took in Middlemarch via audio. Middlemarch just gets more and more complex, and sinister as it goes along. I haven't read many Eliot books, that and Adam Bede and, oh, something else, but not Mill On The Floss. Surely Silas Marner as a child, I think we did it in high school.

Trollope is my favorite, though. And I spent so long reading the Palliser novels, and then rereading them years later, that I have all of Barchester ahead of me yet.

Well, this seems to be contagious - I'm reading "Daniel Deronda" - not "Middlemarch'! I've read two of the Barchesters, but no Pallisers as yet.