BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Thank you for joining me for Book Beginnings on Fridays. Please share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week. You can also share from a book that caught your fancy, even if you are not reading it right now.
MY BOOK BEGINNING
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
-- from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. This is one of the most famous opening lines of any book. I am so glad to finally experience it for myself, in context.
Anna Karenina is one of those classics I have wanted to read forever, yet it languished on my TBR shelf. I finally read War and Peace a couple of years ago as a chapter-a-day slow read. I don't do well with the slow read idea. I'm more of a bolter. I don't like to eke out a book. So no slow read of Anna Karenina for me. I'm reading it straight through. It is one of my TBR 25 in '25 books and on my Classics Club II list.
The Friday 56 is a natural tie-in with Book Beginnings. The idea is to share a two-sentence teaser from page 56 of your featured book. If you are reading an ebook or audiobook, find your teaser from the 56% mark.
Freda at Freda's Voice started and hosted The Friday 56 for a long, long time. She is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. Please visit Anne's blog and link to your Friday 56 post.
MY FRIDAY 56
-- from Anna Karenina:
YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS
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THE FRIDAY 56
Freda at Freda's Voice started and hosted The Friday 56 for a long, long time. She is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. Please visit Anne's blog and link to your Friday 56 post.
MY FRIDAY 56
-- from Anna Karenina:
Immediately after dinner Kitty came in. She knew Anna Arkadyevna, but only very slightly, and she came now to her sister’s with some trepidation, at the prospect of meeting this fashionable Petersburg lady, whom everyone spoke so highly of.
FROM THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION
At its simplest, Anna Karenina is a love story. It is a portrait of a beautiful and intelligent woman whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside all other ties - to her marriage and to the network of relationships and moral values that bind the society around her. The love affair of Anna and Vronsky is played out alongside the developing romance of Kitty and Levin, and in the character of Levin, closely based on Tolstoy himself, the search for happiness takes on a deeper philosophical significance.
One of the greatest novels ever written, Anna Karenina combines penetrating psychological insight with an encyclopedic depiction of Russian life in the 1870s. The novel takes us from high society St Petersburg to the threshing fields on Levin's estate, with unforgettable scenes at a Moscow ballroom, the skating rink, a race course, a railway station. It creates an intricate labyrinth of connections that is profoundly satisfying, and deeply moving.
I loved this book!
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