I wonder if uni affected my enjoyment of books?

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Specifically George Eliot.

This isn't a smug 'oh I bet I'm grown up enough' comment.

I enjoyed Silas Marner at school.

I hated Middlemarch at uni.

Maybe the huge amount of reading which was required on my Victorian module made it so that Middlemarch's flaws, things like being "too long" and having a meandering plot were more obvious than if I took time to read it at my leisure?

Other people read a book a week. I tried to get all my reading done in the summer.

Or, people who've read both books, do you specifically find Middlemarch to be much more boring/meandering than Silas Marner?

I read Silas Marner by mistake! I mean, it was the beginning of the semester, and I was supposed to read another book. But Silas was so good, I didn’t really mind.

I’m figuring just from the odds, Middlemarch probably isn’t as good.

I think English students may get this a lot. English Literature at school put me off William Golding for life. In dorms at uni, I remember an English student looking at my shelves and commenting that I was reading for fun the kind of stuff he was grimly struggling through for work! I definitely think that with any literature that's a bit challenging, you're more likely to enjoy it if you read it at your own pace when you happen to feel like it.