Judging Anna

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
New York: Penquin Books, c2002.
837 p. ; 22 cm.

I tried reading this novel last summer and simply ran out of time, and so this summer I started it in early June and finished it by the end of the month. Several people had recommended Anna Karenina to me and I was not disappointed.

I think the best quality of the book is how sympathetic and complex all the main characters are and how intricately developed personal relationships are in the novel. Whether its the adulterous Anna, her lover Voronsky, the initially superficial Kitty, or the country estate owning Levin- the reader can expect to find her sympathies changing as the characters change and develop throughout the course of this long novel.

I also was pleasantly surprised by several plot twists that caught me completely unawares and reveal the hand of a truly masterful storyteller in Tolstoy.

I read the introduction to the book after finishing the novel and I'm glad I did since there were several plot spoilers in the introduction. But I appreciated the information about Tolstoy's first intentions for the novel - to make it a morality tale about adultery - which he let go of as he developed and came to like the complex main character of the novel, the eponymous Anna Karenina.

Finally, I should note that I read this novel on an eReader, a Nook, and quite liked it.