hypatia13 's review for:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

3.0

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I find I enjoy parts of Tolstoy's books. This one sometimes reads like a Jane Austen novel, which I quite enjoy. And then parts of it seem to go off on irrelevant (to me) discussions on things like the relationship of the Russian peasant to the land, or why we do the things we do, and I just don't enjoy them. It really disrupts the flow of the book, and in some cases, it's just really oddly placed. I mean, Anna kills herself 60 odd pages before the end, but it only gets a passing mention in the rest of the book. It's mostly about Levin and his search for meaning in life.

I do like some of the contrasts though - the relationship between Anna/Vronsky and Kitty/Levin play off of each other quite nicely at times.