Bring me a trophy! A personal pan pizza! Some kind of reward for reading An Book this month, despite devoting nearly every waking minute of my life to working, dissociating to sport (NBA finals, baseball, World Cup, Wimbledon), or socializing. It came down to the wire, I admit—my own personal version of going to penalty kicks—but shout out to my teammate, Elizabeth Gaskell, for writing a Victorian novel so compulsively readable that I happily stayed up late and woke up early to fit more pages into each day.

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855)¹—As a long-time² admirer of Gaskell’s work, I was excited to read another novel by her, especially one that came so highly recommended by Friends of the Report, Bela and Alex. And once I switched from listening to the audio version, which I do NOT recommend,³ to a physical copy, I was even more excited to discover how much I enjoyed this book.

What’s not to like in a 400+ page exploration of the industrial revolution and English regionalism filtered through the experience of “the toughest, most resourceful and emotionally generous of all Victorian heroines”?⁴ Especially one that’s filled with Gaskell’s still-funny nearly 200-year-old jokes and characters so cartoonishly wholesome and righteous it is no wonder Dickens first published North & South in his magazine.⁵

While nothing could be Middlemarch, Gaskell’s novel and its heroine, Margaret Hale, are like older, distant cousins to Eliot’s masterpiece. Focusing on fewer characters, but more locations, and looking more closely at the effects of capitalism on the workers whose exploited labor generates obscene wealth for the owners of the means of production, North & South is juuuuust different enough from the book that wouldn’t be published until 20 years later to largely be enjoyed on its own merits.

[Pausa de hidratación]⁶

Shout out to my other teammate, the compact Oxford English Dictionary, for bringing me immense delight when I searched its pages for the definition of a word I learned while reading North & South—clem/clemming. To learn the word’s meaning was a pleasure in its own right, but then to see it cited from “Mrs. Gaskell North & S.” in an example—well, perhaps my elementary school classmates really perceived me when they’d tell me to “go read the dictionary” 🤣.

Anyway, it was nice to get lost in a book. The Victorians were high key onto something with the whole “serialization” thing. North & South most visibly betrays its origin in the pages of Household Words in its earliest and latest chapters, the former of which are a little too “middle episode of a prestige streaming television show” in that they lean heavy on suspense about things that really aren’t that deep, and the latter of which are so rushed that actually I’m going to conclude this month’s Report right now,⁷ with 20 minutes to go until the Mexico/Ecuador match starts, so I can look up what Dickens’s deal was and why he was on Gaskell’s case to wrap it up.

Marlen Haushofer, tr., Shaun Whiteside, The Fifth Year (1952/2026)

Leonie Swann, tr., Anthea Bell, Three Bags Full (2005/2006)

Tove Jansson, tr., Thomas Teal, The Summer Book (1972/1974)

Jacqueline Harpman, tr., Ros Schwartz, We Were Forbidden (????/2026)