"The May that I was seventeen, I read “Middlemarch” in the space of two weeks, a reminder of how little else there was to do in my narrow English coastal town. The Wildean boyfriend lived, exotically enough, in distant London, a useful arrangement if one is developing a taste for nineteenth-century novels."
Rebecca Mead "The Pleasure of Reading to Impress Yourself" , The New Yorker, Aug.13
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cul...ure-of-reading