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dustincorreale 's review for:
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
I wish I'd read this for class or something so that we could go over it as it progressed. It's a lot to bite off all at once. I'm almost positive I missed a lot of the social themes and undertones.
It's really painful. I just want people to be good. I want to like people.
Actually I think one of the reasons it's so painful is that so many of the people are basically good, or start off good, but then they get tempted or they fall or you just learn more about them. The gradient scale of good is disturbingly shallow. As people drop farther and farther down, your threshold for what you deem as reasonable slips down with them. It's like that optical illusion with the checkered floor tiles half in shadow, and the white tile in the shadow is the same shade as the dark tile out of shadow, even though it still looks white. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion] You start off with your perception of "good" as a true white tile, but as the shadow of everyone's failings and ill use of each other covers the field, what you now consider white is actually what you used to consider grey. "Relatively good", when you're really faced with the implications of it, is pretty awful.
The goodreads rating system is tricky for me on books like this. It was powerful and intricate and subtle and great. A great book. Clearly 4 or 5 stars. But it's hard to say I "really liked it" about something that hurts.
It's really painful. I just want people to be good. I want to like people.
Actually I think one of the reasons it's so painful is that so many of the people are basically good, or start off good, but then they get tempted or they fall or you just learn more about them. The gradient scale of good is disturbingly shallow. As people drop farther and farther down, your threshold for what you deem as reasonable slips down with them. It's like that optical illusion with the checkered floor tiles half in shadow, and the white tile in the shadow is the same shade as the dark tile out of shadow, even though it still looks white. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion] You start off with your perception of "good" as a true white tile, but as the shadow of everyone's failings and ill use of each other covers the field, what you now consider white is actually what you used to consider grey. "Relatively good", when you're really faced with the implications of it, is pretty awful.
The goodreads rating system is tricky for me on books like this. It was powerful and intricate and subtle and great. A great book. Clearly 4 or 5 stars. But it's hard to say I "really liked it" about something that hurts.