The reader would be expected to know about the Armada.

Rosemay Sutcliff’s admirable YA historical novels may as well be scifi if you don’t know the history.

My wife read a fictionalized life of Hemingway’s wife in Paris. There was talk of how much effort the Parisian women put into looking good. The competition would be more explicable if you knew the French had just lost a million eligible young men dead and huge numbers more crippled just a few years earlier.

To put it another way, reading the novels addressed in neo’s piece and by the commenters would, these days, be more work than, I suspect, the authors intended.

(No, I don’t finish books I don’t like. Life is too short.)

2. Is it worth it? Depends.
I’m a huge fan of Trollope and have read some 3 dozen of Trollope’s novels. but only Middlemarch.
Just from the size of the book, Middlemarch does feel as a slog.

I much more enjoyed Trollope’s Barset novels, which give a full universe of characters in a comparable setting. The Last Chronicle Of Barset is a complex, psychological novel rivaling anything by Dosto or Tolstoy.

For the marriage game in a milieu of politics, Trollope’s Palliser novels are very good.

3. If you dislike Austen, your better bet is Trollope rather than Middlemarch.

I dislike most of Dickens, too.

The reader of fantasy and science-fiction knows that the author is speculating on how humans would act in particular circumstances. The more “realistic” novel pretends to more certainty. I imagine some authors may succeed and get humanity right. More often, they are attempting to impose their opinion of what they believe humanity to be.

I love “Middlemarch” and have read it repeatedly. Dorothea’s a character who’s worth getting to know as she slowly grows into her full self, not remotely in the way she expected. But Neo, if you don’t love Jane Austen, you aren’t likely to love George Eliot either. Eliot’s tougher, Austen’s more precise, but both dealt with the same wry, understated humor, complicated explorations of character and social commentary expressed through a few people’s lives rather than sweeping societal events. All very small and inconsequential, even petty, in its outer appearance, but containing multitudes. Doesn’t work unless that’s the kind of story you like.

I don’t know “Daniel Deronda,” but clearly I need to. Thanks to all the commenters who mentioned it!

Read Mark Twain on Cooper’s the Deerslayer (http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html)
I remember that as a kid I tried a couple of different times to wade through the Mohican but though the subject was very interesting to me and should have made wonderful read for a 16 year old kid, the writing was far too florid for me to stick with it.

Maybe because they were written during a time when families sat in the parlor in the evening by the fire, listening to someone reading a book, but wow, they come alive, sound almost contemporary, when read aloud. My theory is they were meant to be read that way.

There are four different narrations of Middlemarch on Audible. The narrator Kate Reading is one of my favorites, she’s very comprehensible and assessable.

I going to listen to Daniel Deronda soon, based on the book recommendation here.