Adam Bede

Adam Bede. It worried me. The main character is a man, and I often have trouble feeling a connection with male main characters. It was first published in 1859, and I sometimes struggle with older titles. The dialogue is written in dialect, and that can be difficult to read. But it is the first book scheduled for Chapter-a-Day this year, and it's written by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), and both of those were great reasons to push through my worries.

So, now that I did and have, what do I think?

It was initially a little bit of a struggle to connect with the character of Adam Bede. But male character Adam is rendered by a female author, and so comes across in a form that I can emotionally connect to.

I did struggle with it in the same ways as I often do with older titles: The plot and dialogue and descriptions of settings and characters often seems overly drawn out; I want to say, Get on with it. And that happened, off and on, throughout Adam Bede. But it wasn't so annoying that I wanted to give up.

The dialogue-written-in-dialect was really tricky for me. Sometimes I had to stop and read the dialogue aloud to figure out what the people were saying. But there was also a sense of accomplishment in doing so, almost like figuring out a clue in a crossword.

Adam Bede is a marvelous book, with rich characters, both heroes and villains, heroes who blunder and act like villains, and villains who rise and act like heroes. It has a story that we can all connect to: falling for someone based on surface qualities and the results of doing that. It has a deep and thoughtful narrator who shares this story with us as if the narrator were in the room with us, relating the tale in person, with a sense of reflection about the happenings of the story that only time and age can give.