What I Found Inside a Used Middlemarch

I bought the copy of Middlemarch for two dollars, which is about what it was worth in the condition it was in. The spine was broken in three places. Someone had read it in the bath. Someone, I would learn, had read it many times.

Inside the front cover was a grocery list in blue ink: eggs, lemons, stamps, call Ruth. Halfway through, pressed flat against a page about Dorothea’s wedding, was a violet so old it had turned the color of weak tea.

But it was the underlining that kept me up. Three different pens, maybe three different decades. In black, careful straight lines under the sentences about ambition. In blue, wobbly ones under the sentences about marriage. And in pencil, very lightly, as if the reader didn’t want to be caught, a single line under the book’s last paragraph, the one about people who live faithfully a hidden life.

I don’t know who she was. I’m fairly sure it was a she, and fairly sure it was the same she all three times. I have started to think of it as the most honest book review I’ve ever read.