Reading and Thinking About Anna Karenina

    A friend of mine recently re-read this novel, and that made me happy. Or, satisfied in the sense that I have read it, as of October 2021, and it made me happy to know that this friend had re-absorbed it and would bring a new or renewed understanding of it.

    Tolstoy. 

    Tolstoy and I have a strange relationship, as much as a dude in the United States can have with a world-acclaimed and famous writer who died over a hundred years ago. I tried to read his epic War and Peace as a sixth grader, and I was liking it. I knew the characters, I understood the plot, I was digging the history and the sheer knowledge that I, a punk kid at a punk college town middle school was absorbing it!

    I let a teacher dissuade me from continuing. This may have been the beginning of the end of me as a literary figure. Who knows what would have become of me if I had absorbed it as a youth!? Kidding.

    Well, mostly kidding. That experience changed me, or affected me. But, it adds to my pleasure of having read Anna Karenina decades later, and to know that others have conquered it.

    Or if not conquered, at least attempted, and one can say that they read every page.

    Perhaps it seems that there are certain classic pieces in literature that I feel must be read to be a part of today's world. Yes, safe to say that I feel this way.

    Tolstoy is one. Dostoyevsky is another. Russians, both.

    There is more to say and think and say and analyze. Scrutinize. Speculate.

    But, I will let this rest on my and your brain, for now.

    2024. Entering the second year of the war in Ukraine.