Constance Garnett

This is primarily the story of Anna Karenina's troubled affair with Alexey Vronsky. It's also the story of Konstantin Levin's search for love and truth in society. While reading this book, I kept wishing that I could just read a "good parts version" as William Goldman called The Princess Bride. I kept getting bogged down in Tolstoy's reflections, mostly through Levin's eyes, of how decadent, silly, redundant, and complicated life in the upper class of 19th-century Russian society was. There would be pages and pages of a tangent that could have been an essay called "What's Wrong With Agriculture in Russia." I didn't care. There were also pages and pages of Levin watching an election and having no idea what was going on. If he didn't get it, there's no way that this 21st-century American woman is going to. Those parts just seemed to drag on and on and on. But the story itself was beautifully written and really made me think. I'm all for women's rights, but I would catch myself thinking, "What a selfish, ungrateful woman!" And then I would think, "Well, if it weren't for women like Anna pushing the limits of acceptable behavior, you wouldn't enjoy the freedoms you do today." And then I'd go right back to thinking, "I can't stand her! She wants everything her way!" I'm not really exaggerating. I really had this internal dialog going on throughout almost every scene that featured Anna. I think part of the problem for me was that her husband was a good man, she just didn't love him. So I was torn between how Anna was hurting him and her quest for love. I was worried about reading this, not necessarily because of the size, but because I wasn't sure how difficult it would be to…