Why is Everyone Suddenly Reading Middlemarch?

Quick thoughts on the rise of interest in the classic works of western literature.

You probably saw Patrick Collison’s tweet about the books he read in 2024. If you haven’t; you should. Collison is the founder of Stripe, and one of the intellectual forces behind the so-called Progress Studies movement. He’s a powerhouse in the world of bright young folks doing interesting things. This year, he read a number of classic novels – Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, To The Lighthouse, Bleak House, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina, Life and Fate, Heart of Darkness, Madame Bovary, and The Magic Mountain to be precise.

The classic novels were everywhere among a certain type of very smart, tuned to what’s next, kind of guy (see e.g., Nabeel Qureshi who also read Middlemarch last year; and Dan Shulz who read Dr. Faustus, among others).

Prolific blogger and king of Twitter Matt Yglesias ALSO read Middlemarch last year and, of course, blogged about it. *

I can’t help but wonder why this is

Some of this, I suspect, is mimetic desire – Collison can move the market in many things – but I also think the reading habits of those living just that little bit in the future are updating based on the rise of the LLMs and mixed (at best) feelings about the destruction of our attention.

If you’re interested in, say, how insurance works, it’s far more efficient to query an LLM than it is to read a run of the mill narrative history of the war. If you want to get a handle on the debate around tariffs, again, an LLM is probably your best bet. But if you want to experience what it is to be human in a full sense, with all the minutiae of life and emotion, is there anything better than a Victorian novel?

Collison himself explains why he read the books he did this way:

“they are simply some of the finest intellectual achievements of humanity, and worthy of engagement for that reason alone: a deeper appreciation for excellence is itself a valuable thing.”

But there’s more to it that that. Yglesias has said he has started reading more classics novels because he wanted to, “arrest the internet’s tendency to melt my brain by setting aside time every day to read classic works of literature.”

As the machines take on more of our toil, and easily fulfill our more base desires, I think we’ll see more of this in a bifurcation of culture. Popular entertainment will often just be hyper palatable AI slop, but we’ll also be drawn, more and more, to the best in art that our species has created. Yes, people will play mindless video games specifically designed to keep them tethered to their phones and unable to focus, but you’ll also see the smartest and most curious among us undergoing a deep, focused, re-engagement with art and nature.

It’s going to be an exciting time in the life of the mind.

As for me, last year I began what I expect to be a years long re-engagement with the classical world. And right now, I’m reading Bleak House myself. It’s remarkable. Its harder than I expected (sentence structure make Sean feel dumb) but also funnier and more rewarding — a whole world in 900 pages. There’s so much out there to read and explore in classic literature. Great to see so many brilliant people engaging in it.

*It’s worth noting, as it always is, that these folks are in the intellectual orbit of super reader Tyler Cowen whose influence on the intellectual world just seems to grow every year.