Part III, Chapters 1-6: Country Matters

One of the only things that people seem to like more than watching movies and TV shows is complaining about their various inaccuracies. I'd love to have a pint of vanilla almond bark Tofutti for every time I heard some variation of "It's unfathomable that a fat slob like him could snag Katherine Heigl." Or, "How can they spend that much time by the water cooler but not ever have to pee?" Or, "If it was really that easy to learn martial arts, everyone would be karate chopping their onions and those people who sell knife sets would go out of business."

And the Fruit Ninja app would be irrelevant.

The truth, as we all know deep down, is that we aren't searching for reality in Hollywood or the media. Why bother? If I want to see guys who don't look like perfection incarnate, all I have to do is be anywhere besides a screening of Magic Mike. In fact, any latent desire to experience the unglamorous aspects of life - bad breath, fatigue, a lingering sense of gloom and regret - was more than satisfied on the first day of my 8 AM class. This is why I'd like to offer a suggestion to the next person who thinks about criticizing The Newsroom for being overly dramatized: read one of Anna Karenina's painstakingly detailed descriptions of farm labor. Then tell me what makes the daily grind so much better than Olivia Munn delivering Sorkinisms.

It definitely doesn't lend itself to GIFs.

Levin disagrees. Unlike his brother, who likes to limit his experience with country life to speaking about it in idyllic terms, Levin just loves to rough it. He'll grab a scythe and start cutting grass at the drop of a streaker's pants in Davis Library during exam week (that's "with minimal motivation," for those of you unfamiliar with UNC campus life). I get that Tolstoy was trying to show that Levin was the total opposite of all those pampered aristocrats we encountered earlier, but the whole thing seems more than a tad forced. I mean, the laborers in his team don't just get excited over finding bugs and snacking on soggy bread. They get excited about working overtime with no compensation, because they just love to strain their backs under the hot sun. This portrayal seems suspiciously like an attempt to justify Levin's earlier claim that educating peasants is a waste of money:

"...why should I worry myself about establishing dispensaries which I shall never make use of, and schools to which I shall never send my children, to which even the peasants don't want to send their children, and to which I've no very firm faith that they ought to send them?"

If you're like me, then a small part of your soul died after reading that.

Levin, you're breaking my heart!

Really, how much more patronizing can a guy be without straight up morphing into an Apple commercial? Levin's attitude toward the common folk reminds me of how the white Southern ladies treated their maids in The Help - that is, being all buddy-buddy with them until the possibility of actual societal advancement comes up. While his hands-on approach is more genuine than his brother's armchair philosophizing, Levin has a long way to go when it comes to defying the Russian caste system. No matter how cute it is when he freaks out about forgetting to check up on his decrepit housekeeper after she sprains her wrist.

As previously mentioned, one of the most unbelievable parts of the farming sequence for me was the delight Levin and the other men took in their humble meal of "sop," or bread soaked in kvass (an alcoholic drink similar to beer) and salted. While this sounds even less appetizing than the mayonnaise-smeared salad I saw on an anonymous plate in the dining hall yesterday, today's Official Lit Dish of Russian black bread has potential to be my new favorite sandwich securer. Why build your PB&J with that weirdly spongy Wonder Bread when you can be chowing down on a symbol of lower-class humility and simplicity instead?

Part II, Chapters 30-35: Germany is the Best Medicine

After a hiatus almost entirely dedicated to college move-in, I returned to Anna Karenina in a mood as stormy as a North Carolina summer night. Half of this could be attributed to the big toe that was aching long after I dropped my book-loaded ottoman on it. The rest came from not wanting to deal with the whole Vronsky/Anna/Alexei situation right then. I'm a believer in characters suffering - as many writers have pointed out, it's the only way to make readers fall in love with them - but all the cheating and dying and unplanned pregnancy was getting me down. And why would anyone want to kick off one of the best years of their life (the light blue brochures I received in the mail were very firm on this point) feeling like they got their heart rammed through a shredder?

Freshman year was bad enough.

But when I turned to Chapter 30, salvation arrived in the unlikely form of Kitty Shcherbatsky, whose exploits in a German "watering hole" - which here refers to a health spa, and not a socializing area for elephants, so get that scene from The Lion King out of your head - are so delightfully silly that they read almost like a separate book. Kitty makes friends, Kitty finds religion, Kitty attracts the attention of a married man...all of which dissolves by the end of Part II. It's like Eat, Pray, Love meets The Baby-sitters Club Super Special: Guten Tag, Germany! Except that Kitty's fascination with strangers comes across as more creepy than cute.

...Kitty, as often happened, felt an inexplicable attraction to Mademoiselle Varenka...The more attentively Kitty watched her unknown friend, the more convinced she was that this girl was the perfect creature she fancied her, and the more eagerly she wanted to make her acquaintance.

For the record, Varenka is a pale and ageless-looking girl who likes to hang around dying people. If the word "vampire" immediately jumped into your head, you get brownie points for being right on my wavelength. Unfortunately, as Bram Stoker was still an unpaid theater critic in the 1870s, any vampiric subtext in Anna Karenina is anachronous and not intentional on Tolstoy's part.

But there's always this steampunk rewrite to tide us over.

Varenka would be much more interesting if she were a soulless and tormented creature of the night. She's a cloyingly sweet character, the kind you secretly wish would suffer a horrible demise in the style of Mark Twain's "Good Little Boy." Kitty can't get over how "wonderfully sweet" it is that Varenka devotes her life to taking care of her invalid adopted mother and other sickly aristocrats. Moreover, they share the burden of rejection by a suitor, a fact that astounds Kitty:

"Why, if I were a man, I could never care for anyone else after knowing you."

Whatever the reader wants to make of that quote  (I've already addressed the issue of possible lesbian undertones in the novel), Varenka captivates Kitty in a way that Anna might have earlier, had the Vronsky conflict not ensued to disrupt it. Our Princess Spitfire - remember her awesome denouncement of the misogynistic social system? - morphs into a Good Little Girl in the space of a chapter. And while there's nothing wrong with martyrly ideals or caring for the sick, it's more a product of her Varenka-worship than a genuine sense of morality.

Sort of like how I listen to terrible wrock music out of pure Potter devotion.

Kitty's attempt to become a different person worked out about as well as Michael Jackson's. The impoverished artist she nurses through illness develops an adulterous longing for his "sister of mercy"; Varenka's suffering mother is revealed to be a selfish snoot. Then Kitty goes all "Born This Way" on Varenka in a moment of pure Emersonian awesomeness.

"Yes, yes, I know you're all perfection; but what am I to do if I'm bad? This would have never been if I weren't bad. So let me be what I am, but not to be a sham...I can't act except from the heart..."

By the time Kitty returns to Russia, she's blossomed into the hypocrisy-hating, take-me-as-I-am-or-let-me-go grrl who we all know was lurking under those ruffled petticoats all along. She's gotten over her relationship drama - aside from a brief pang upon running into Levin's obnoxious brother at one point - and her mysterious illness (if they are, indeed, distinct). She's also developed a taste for plum soup, which is an Official Lit Dish that I will not be making anytime soon. Even my adoration of literary-inspired food preparation doesn't justify kicking all my hallmates out of the dorm kitchen to boil a giant pot of plums.

Ramen experimentation is a different story.

Stay tuned for Part III! It looks like there's a lot of Loverboy Levin, so my hopes are high.

Part II, Chapters 16-21: A Horse Named Frou-Frou

Everybody has one: that friend who wildly overestimates his or her knowledge about a subject to which you've devoted your life, your love, and your Facebook cover picture. The outcome can range from amusing to downright infuriating, depending on how much the right pronunciation of your childhood heroes' names matters to you.

"I wish J. K. Rall-ling had made Hermy-one end up with...why are you twitching like that?"

Levin's clueless friend is Stepan, and the result is one of the more comical scenes about land dealership I've encountered in literature. Stepan's city boy notions about forest prices are like calling Gabby Douglas "un-American"; not just off the mark, but completely and appallingly wrong. Levin knows better, of course, but Stepan is too much of a sophisticate to take advice from someone who oversees countryside property for a living. This ticks off Levin considerably (since Tolstoy has already established him as some kind of agricultural savant) and sends him into an unironic defense of the stratified class system that would warm the hearts of all 11 people who want the feudal system instated in America.

"[L]iving in good style - that's the proper thing for noblemen; it's only the nobles who know how to do it...The gentleman does nothing, while the peasant works and supplants the idle man. That's how it should be."

At least his anti-revolutionary rant is a break from the 24/7 all-Kitty-all-the-time broadcast running through his brain. Now that he's learned from Stepan that she's still on the market, Levin is lovin' once again. Too bad his snotty attitude about Vronsky ought to be a complete turnoff for any self-respecting woman:

"You consider Vronsky an aristocrat, but I don't. A man whose father crawled up from nothing at all by intrigue, and whose mother - God knows whom she wasn't mixed up with...No, excuse me, but I consider myself aristocratic, and people like me, who can point back in the past to three or four honorable generations of their family..."

Whoa there, Lev. First, you're getting mighty close to caste system mentality, and second, you're the one with the brother who beat up a village elder. Take a chill pill and learn a lesson from Poli Sci Ryan Gosling.

That's better.

Meanwhile, Vronsky is busy managing the taxing duties of horse races, an affair with Anna, and his job, in that order. I'm still not clear on what being a regiment leader actually means. It's this supposedly prestigious position that requires him to occasionally eat steak with a bunch of permanently hungover manboys. If you substitute Ramen for steak, that sounds suspiciously like the daily routine of a million plain old college students, but it's afforded Vronsky a great deal of respect...although it still doesn't stop his fellow officers from making fun of how fat and bald he's getting.

In case this wasn't a big enough hint at Vronsky's waning masculinity, Tolstoy had to go and have him name his prized racehorse Frou-Frou. And the man wonders why his jockey doesn't treat him with his due respect.

To everyone who realized this was the namesake for that horse in The Aristocats: I tip my hat to you.

With this additional poor reflection on Vronsky's decision-making, I'm more skeptical than ever about his resolution at the end of Chapter 21 to "abandon everything" and run off with Anna. I mean, we're talking about the guy who made sex with Anna his goal for an entire year, only to worry about having too much once he got it:

[H]e needed occupation and distraction quite apart from his love, so as to recruit and rest himself from the violent emotions that agitated him.

Consistency issues aside, I do owe Vronsky for inspiring today's Official Lit Dish. In honor of his beefy breakfast, here's a recipe for portobello mushroom steaks. They're a healthy and meatless alternative that Tolstoy - a committed vegetarian - would have surely appreciated.

Part II, Chapters 1-3: Hello, Kitty

And now we break from the steamy sexual tension of Anna and Vronsky to catch up with Kitty, who was last seen choking back tears as her Big Night spiraled into a living version of Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know." Like Levin, she does not easily recover from the pangs of unrequited love. Unlike Levin, her reaction to it is to come down with a mysterious illness that involves "failing strength" and doesn't respond to treatment. Everyone just assumes that Vronsky's rejection left her heartsick, a condition quite common to Unrequited Tragic Maidens in classic literature. It's kind of a wimpy reason to lie in bed all day, but it was more socially acceptable back then.

The modern equivalent is excessive use of Tumblr.

 Except they're only half right. Kitty's sick, all right - sick of the slimy underbelly of high society, to which Vronsky's betrayal opened her eyes.

"If mamma takes me to a ball - it seems to me she takes me only to marry me off as fast as possible, and get me off her hands...These suitors so called - I can't bear the sight of them. It seems to me as if they're always taking stock of me...everything appears to me, in the coarsest, most loathsome aspect."

She's Holden Caulfield, calling out the prep school phonies. She's Nick Caraway, shouting that the East Eggers are a rotten crowd. She's Cinderella, if Cinderella had decided that Prince Charming was totally superficial and divorced him to start her own housekeeping business. She is mad about being objectified and that is awesome.

Even if the chance that she'll pull a River Tam and vent her frustration over an oppressive system into crazy ninja moves is, admittedly, rather low.

The irony is that both of Kitty's parents are obsessing over the Vronsky situation when her sister - Dolly - is dealing with post-childbirth recovery, six kids with scarlet fever, and an AWOL husband who has already started up a new affair after promising it would never, ever happen again. Come to think of it, Dolly gets about as much crap in this part of the book as Levin did earlier. C'mon, Stepan, you can at least lend a hand with the Oblonsky Bunch when you aren't busy with your girlfriend...especially considering that children died from scarlet fever all the time in the 1800s. (One of them was Leo Tolstoy's seven-year-old son, Ivan.)

However, despite the debauchery and reality television-worthy antics in the lives of Tsarist Russian aristocrats, there's one perk that makes me think twice about throwing a Pity Kitty party. Namely, that the doctors recommend going abroad as the best treatment for her condition, and her mom and dad buy into it. Ha! I wish that every time I felt strangely weak, my parents would spring for a trip to Paris or Milan. I'd even take Disney World. Or how about just the Lands in Epcot?

Canadians in kilts playing Celtic rock? I feel better already.

One of the remedies tried on Kitty was iron, which was probably administered in the form of pill supplements invented during the nineteenth century. A much tastier source would have been this granola, made with ultra-healthy blackstrap molasses. It's also one of the Official Lit Dishes that I can easily make in my dorm's kitchen. If only European travel was as accessible as this treatment...

A is for "Anna Karenina"

We all like to think of ourselves as open-minded when it comes to books, right? Liking lots of different kinds of literature is practically the Eighth Holy Virtue. It means that you're stretching your mind, and also that you can appreciate the fact that Time Magazine listed both Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret and Watchmen as among 100 best novels of all time. For years, I never questioned my range of reading material.  As an eighteenth-century British literature fan who also liked science fiction, why should I?

Just not always together.

Then I went to college. And several philosophical texts and indie surrealist plays later, I realized that I'd spent the past 18 years well within my literary comfort zone. Which, incidentally, is a dangerous place to be.  If we don't read books that frighten us - books that rant about subjects we don't understand, books that even Hermione Granger wouldn't consider "light reading" and books that have spawned criticism collections longer than they are (here's looking at you, Ulysses) - then we can only grow so much. Somehow, the idea that some literary works are too deep or too foreign for the average modern reader to understand has become prevalent in the current cultural attitude. I am going to challenge this idea.

I'm not a professor or an English grad student. I'm a teenage girl. I take pride in baking the perfect loaf of banana bread and finishing my French homework in time to watch Stephen Colbert. And for the next who-knows-how-long, I am going to lay claim to 26 of the most renowned works of literature in the world. Specifically, ones that I normally wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole for 100 points of extra credit and free Starbucks for the rest of my life.

These are nothing compared to the bliss of never opening Moby Dick, even if they come with their own rocket ship.

My first book is Anna Karenina. Not only does it start with an A, setting up a nice little alphabetical title sequence for me to follow, but Russian literature is scary. All those long, consonant-full names!  All those allusions to Eastern Europe politics! (Am I the only one who never got the whole Prussia-Russia thing?  I can list every one of Henry VIII's wives and their children, but my eyes glaze over every time I try to remember anything about Frederick the Great.) I'm also hoping for a scandalicious, Us Weekly-worthy plot since the title character is a famously adulterous woman.

The upcoming movie looks hot, but so would a film adaptation of Webster's Dictionary if Keira and Jude were in it.

I also want to see if the central theme of the novel as proposed by Klaus Baudelaire in A Series of Unfortunate Events turns out to be correct: "[A] rural life of of moral simplicity, despite its monotony, is the preferable personal narrative to a daring life of impulsive passion, which only leads to tragedy." After getting through the 935 pages in my edition, I'll be kinda impressed if I can utter any noise other than a guttural groan of relief, let alone anything vaguely resembling a thesis statement.

This is my ground rule: I will not do outside research on the book's commonly recognized main ideas or symbols or meanings (author info and Eastern European history are fair game, since Anna Karenina was written with nineteenth-century Russians as the target audience). We live in the Information Age, and it's become ridiculously easy to know things without ever learning them for ourselves. I'm starting from scratch.

So. Chapter 1. Here goes nothing.