Tomorrow is the second meeting of my Anna Karenina book club. I have never been in a book club before this one, and am discovering the things that are good and bad about them.
Good: Eating snacks, drinking wine, and having others confirm my suspicion that Vronsky is the 19th Century Russian version of every douchy hipster I have ever dated.
Bad: Having a date I need to finish different parts of the book by compels me to treat this like a school assignment, meaning I don't open the book for weeks then have to cram before our meeting and read 100 pages in two days. I thought being in a book club would encourage me to read more, but there is a good chance this will be the only thing I get through this summer.
Anna Karenina has been on my list of "books I should read" for the past five years though, so I guess I can live with that. It also helps that Anna Karenina is basically a soap opera. I'm not even halfway through and already there have been two affairs, an unplanned pregnancy, a rejected marriage proposal, and two characters predicting their own deaths. The only things keeping the novel from really kicking into high gear are the lack of evil twins and all those chapters about farming. I can only assume that those issues will work themselves out in the next 450 pages. Otherwise it wouldn't be a classic, right?
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