I don't read many other blogs. I don't know why. My habit is to make frequent repetitive visits to a very small number of familiar sites rather than to seek out novel and unfamiliar excitements. I suppose, given my rereading habits, this pattern is no big surprise.

But one of the blogs I regularly check is the very first blog I ever started reading. In fact, it's the blog the made me think that I might be able to manage one myself. It's called Monkeysquirrel, and it functions as the occasional notebook of Scott Hill, a writer, reader, illustrator, photographer, and extraordinarily good high school English teacher whom I met at my first Frost Place Conference on Poetry & Teaching.

I visited his blog yesterday, and this is what I read. Once you've read it too, you may understand why I keep going back.

Managed to complete [George Eliot's novel] Adam Bede this weekend in a torrid session of reading during a rare extended period of silence at home. And the thing is so dang good. Reader, I cried. I'm not sure I was quite ready for the turn the plot takes after Hetty's fate is resolved, but it's still done so beautifully you just don't care. And to drag out the suspense a little Eliot even parades the whole cast of the Poyser farm out for one last ensemble piece at a dinner; we get to meet the bit players in mini-portraits at the table. I had been wondering why we hadn't seen more of the common laborers on the farm, since Eliot seems to love training the lens on them so much. I wish she didn't wait so long to do it here. But at least this last supper scene lets us savor for one last time the phenomenon that is Mrs. Poyser, who might be, of all the Eliot characters I can remember, the one with the quickest, most biting, most creative wit. And then there is a wedding and then it is done.

I'm in that rosy period where you remember the book and the characters and you can think about it actively and productively and even authoritatively if you are in such a mood. It won't be long, though, before the particulars will fade and I will remember only broad outlines of things and then I will forget even that and only remember that I loved the experience of reading the book. It will turn into pure feeling. Hopefully, I will have room in my life for a re-read by then.

Scott, if you're reading this, I hope you don't mind that I've quoted you here. For me, it is a gift simply to know that at least one other person on the planet is living in and alongside Adam Bede with this sympathy, this openness to heartache. Thank you.