Silas Marner Complete:

Silas Marner's saving grace is that it is a short novel.  This works well because there really isn't much content to speak of in terms of plot.  It is interesting that the book would be so apropos to what I'm discussing in the modern day, though.  Silas Marner is this bachelor who happens upon a foundling and raises the daughter as his own, and becomes happy as a result.

What was I just saying about how men deserve a chance at fatherhood and should have children of their own?  Well, apparently all the way back in the 1800's George Eliot was writing about the exact same thing.  How lucky single men would be if they could all be given free orphan girls to raise.  Nothing has changed.  Just as Silas Marner was blessed with the company of a daughter then, so too would any bachelor today be blessed with one now.

Also very apropos to the modern era, the reason the baby was an orphan is because her mother died of an opium overdose.  Where have we seen that lately in the news?  Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.  The same mistakes, over and over again, and the same solutions are posited, over and over again, but the mistakes are never corrected and the solutions are never implemented.  It makes you despair of any chance at human progress -- and yet clearly we are living in a better manner than the cave men of yore, so like the flow of glass or glaciers humans are making progress at an imperceptibly slow speed.  Perhaps in five more centuries Silas Marner won't be a mirror copy of the world today but actually primitive, and then finally we'll be able to talk about the plot and say --"look how foolish our forebears were!"

With Silas Marner done, I'm done with George Eliot, and also finished with all the authors featured in my good books hall of fame.

There is still one thing left to do, though.  Once the Suka Suka anime ends next week, which covers up to the ending of the third volume of the light novels, I'll be free to read the fourth volume of the light novels, the only one translated into English that spans past the anime's ending.

That one book is the only book left to read in English left worth reading in the world.  Once I've read that, I'll be at the mercy of translators if I'm to read anything more ever again.  The day had to come eventually I suppose.