Anna Karenina - Tolstoy

More than anything, I am proud of having finished this monster of a book, and pretty quickly too! Took me about... 2 weeks? I can understand the appeal of the book, especially when trying to imagine what it would have been like to read that book when it was first published. And a lot of it still stands the test of time. Some things never change I guess. And I was amazed at how well Tolstoy wrote from the female perspective. I felt sometimes that he did a better job writing from the female perspective than from the male. There were parts that were fascinating and engrossing and other parts that were unbelievably boring.

More than once, I would just totally knock out and fall asleep during one of those chapters full of philosophical ramblings or paragraph after paragraph of 19th century Russian farming techniques. My god.

It was a decent read, but I'm baffled by people who claim it's one of the greatest novels ever written. And what the smurf, Oprah? This is totally NOT the greatest love story ever told. In fact, most of the characters were highly unlikable. It's hard to read a book when you really don't care if almost every single character (with maybe the exception of Kitty) just went ahead and died.