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.