Currently reading: recovering from strep throat edition

Bram Stoker, Dracula
Accidentally returned to the library before I was done, but eh. I have seen the Spanish-language Universal Dracula and Nosferatu, I'm familiar with what happens from where I left off. It's mostly a gothic novel where the plot is the main thing, and written in the found-manuscript style so popular in the 19th century (and due for a comeback, I think). Two small observations: it is expertly done to see how the racism and condescension of the English characters is used by Dracula to effect his plan, a detail that's completely lost in the film adaptations. Harker's diaries are all about how amazing it is that this weird exotic foreigner is actually pretty good at understanding real, civilized law and business, and that sets him up as a target. Additionally, it is the Victorian stigma against all matters relating to sex and the body that allow Dracula to get so close to success--nobody's asking too many questions about Lucy's bite marks and subsequent ill-health.

Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries
As we approach the end--~100 pages left--we accept that in this universe of a book there are certain critical things we're simply not going to learn, such as: how Gesine made it to the west in the first place; how Jakob became the father of her child (it seems there was some kind of romance there, but in the past-timeline it's 1952 and she's with a completely different boy); how her beloved father dies. A book can't be about everything, but I would like this specific book to be about those things, please.

George Eliot, Middlemarch
I identified as a youth so strongly with Dorothea that her obvious mistake in the beginning of the book held me back for a long time; even reading all the way through I failed to notice that it was Casaubon who was the real villain there. Currently cringing over Lydgate and Rosamond, having once been in a similar relationship with someone who had very fixed ideas of what her life should be like and a willingness to reign over a crater of a relationship so long as she was reigning.