So I am finally finished with Anna Karenina. It only took me 3 months to listen to it in the car! Why you may ask? Because HE found it boring, and I could only listen the 10 minutes between his work and mine most days. It was a book that he had always wanted to read, in fact we even have a copy of it here at the house. But when we put the first disk in, he lost interest. I can only hope that the reason he had such a hard time listening to it was that the narrator was just so monotone that he couldn't stay focused. To be honest, this is one of several books I have listened to that were like that. There is so little inflection or character voicing in so many of the recordings from Recorded Books that there have been a few books I have finished without really knowing what happened in the story. There is definitely something to be said about being a good storyteller.
Oh, and while I am on the subject of storytellers, we watched the movie with Kiera Knightly the other day. Dear Mr. Joe Wright, producer of the film, what was the purpose of the stage? I found the entire stage and backdrops distracting from the real story. So many movie producers nowadays think that they can tell the story better than the original authors. Why? These books have sold millions of copies because the original story was good. *end rant.*
Anna Karenina is the story of a society wife in 19th century Russia who married for position but then later found love and took a lover. Some say that this book is Tolstoy's spiritual manifesto, but that train of thought only really appears in the last chapters of the book, after Anna's death.
While I would not count this book as one of my favorites, I did find it to be a good story, although a bit long and drawn out. Maybe next time I will go for the abridged (gasp) version.
