A Great (Book) Undertaking

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Hello obligated readers (Sean, this includes you).

I'm currently reading Anna Karenina, which is pleasantly surprising me. I'm using the newest translation so it's easy to understand. Apparently other translations say things like "an extra pouch of fabric in his pants to hold his money" instead of "a pocket."

Admittedly, the story started off a little slow for me and I would only read about a chapter a day (oh, and the chapters are approximately four pages long) but it picked up around chapter 8 or 9 and now I'm interested.

The only thing that's weird to me is that for a book that could double as a highly functional doorstop all about this woman named Anna Karenina, I just met her 60 pages in. I guess Tolstoy figured he had plenty of time in the 817 pages to spin his yarn.

Also, there are a lot of sentences that end in "he said in English" or that are completely written in French. These people are Russian and everyone knows at least Russian, English, and French?! Every time I come across one of those I feel significantly uneducated. Three years of high school French and 4 semesters of Spanish didn't get me very far it seems.

This is one of my favorite movies.

If anyone hasn't read it yet, so far I recommend it. It's like the movie Bridges of Madison County meets pretty much any soap opera...or at least that's where it looks to be heading.