Anna Karenina

⚖The case for it

The scything chapter, a full day of Levin mowing hay beside his peasants, gets remembered by one reader as "a celebratory meditation on physical labor," which is not what anyone expects from the farming sections of a Russian novel. That is the running surprise here: "the 900 page classic from 150 years ago is unputdownable," as one convert puts it, "this kind of Russian soap opera, filled with weird and intriguing characters." Tolstoy runs the skating-rink courtship and a woman's slow unraveling in parallel and villainizes no one, not Karenin, not Vronsky, not Anna. "Even dozens of pages about farming and politics can't divest me," one reader concedes mid-book. And the comedy is real: the book opens on Stiva caught with the family governess, beaming through his own scandal, forgiven by nearly everyone within a few chapters, which is exactly the hypocrisy the novel will spend eight hundred pages billing his sister for.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

"This went on for like 200 pages," one reader says of the jealousy spiral, the same accusation cycling to the horizon. The farming and land-reform chapters fare worse, a love story "buried under pages of unreadable and irrelevant prattle," and the whole undertaking runs long enough that finishing reads as endurance: "reading this 800+ page tome has been an odyssey." Every character answers to four names depending on the speaker; keep a list or drown. "I wanted to stab myself every time Anna showed up," confesses one reader who came for the romance and left exhausted by it. And the ledger never balances: Stiva philanders for free while Anna pays full price for one affair, an unfairness the book seems closer to blessing than examining.

— the honest librarian

17h

honest hours

24

sittings