Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy, 1878
A society novel about a marriage coming apart and a landowner trying to build a meaningful life, full of dinner tables, fields, jealousy and philosophy.
Leo Tolstoy
1828–1910
Tolstoy notices the small things: how someone eats at a dinner table, what a field looks like in spring, why a husband and wife stop hearing each other. Both books move slowly and pay close attention to people, and both are long, so pick «Anna Karenina» if you want a marriage and a farm to start with, or «War and Peace» if you'd rather have five families and an invasion.
Feels like love, awe and family.
Start with Anna Karenina.
Tolstoy began the novel after reading an unfinished Pushkin fragment that opens with guests arriving at a country house; the scene set off his own first chapter.
The strange calm that arrives when a lie comes out perfectly.
Anna said what came to her lips, and marveled, hearing herself, at her own capacity for lying. How simple and natural were her words, and how likely that she was simply sleepy! She felt herself clad in an impenetrable armor of falsehood. She felt that some unseen force had come to her aid and was supporting her. Books by Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy, 1869
Five families, one invasion, and the small domestic hours that turn out to matter more than the battles. Read it for the people, not the history.
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