Anna Karenina - Day 6

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It is the nature of this kind of challenge that I tend to know a fair bit about the books before I'm picking them up either because people talk about them or because I've read sections of them before. It's easy, in fact, to think that I know all I really need to and the reading itself is just icing. That's probably how I landed with this list.

So, before picking up Anna Karenina I already had a rough idea of the plot. I knew about Anna and Vronsky. I knew there was a Kitty in there, but I didn't know how she was connected. I did not know about Levin and it seems to me at this point that Levin is the most likable of the characters.

I'll admit that Levin is a bit moody, but he's also the character that makes the most sense to me. He's a member of the aristocracy but goes out to do manual labor on his estate in order to get the mood lifting effects of heavy exertion. He doesn't like the conflict between the classes and strives to find ways to change things which opens him up to some mockery. When Kitty rejects him in favor of Vronsky, he can't imagine trying her again when Vronsky ditches her for Anna. All in all, I get Levin and I like him even when he does foolish things.

I was talking to Ivan the other day. He and I argue about the relative merits of Shakespeare on an annual basis. He hates Shakespeare and I'm constantly defending it. In one of these conversations I noted that reading anything in translation was bound to kill some of what makes a piece of literature good. As a slovak, Ivan read Shakespeare in translation but he read Anna Karenina in russian.

Yesterday, Ivan noticed I was reading Anna Karenina so we chatted about it. It also turns out that our media specialist, Susan is a big fan. It's weird how different an experience reading in this challenge is.