Author Rebecca Mead presents 'My Life in Middlemarch'

What is your favorite book? The one you’ve read over and over, pages dog-eared, notes in the margin? For New Yorker writer (and our Fort Greene neighbor) Rebecca Mead it is George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and in her new book My Life in Middlemarch Mead looks back at her life as a reader.

Virginia Woolf famously called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” but as Mead astutely notes, “only a child thinks a grown-up has stopped growing,” and so each time she returned to the novel, she found herself learning from it anew in every stage of her life.

Mead discusses the novel and the evolution of reading with friend and fellow writer Adelle Waldman, author of the novel The Love Affairs of Nathanial P.