by Thomas Hardy
I'm reading Far from the Madding Crowd now and I love it! That Bathsheba Everdene is quite something. "She had never taken kindly to marriage in the abstract" indeed! ]]>
bookshelves: stone-classics
The exact sentence where Anna Karenina becomes impossible to put down
You and I both know what happens: Anna meets Vronsky, falls in love, is scorned, and jumps under the train. Reading the novel itself is the most straightforward way to learn a little more about this classic, but she takes her time getting started, circling around the main characters and only introducing Anna after about 18 chapters. [For more Anna Karenina material, check out my blog, JQR's Secret City, and my tag set of Anna Karenina-related stuff: http://jqr.posterous.com/tag/annakarenina.]
But as I reached Chapter 22, all of a sudden it's as if the Taj Mahal
has sprung up from once-barren ground. "The ball was only just
beginning as Kitty and her mother walked up the great staircase,
flooded with light, and lined with flowers and footmen in powder and
red coats." Tolstoy takes such care to describe the ball, to describe
Kitty's dress, to describe her feelings about that dress, to describe
Anna's dress, Kitty's reactions to it, and then, in the penultimate
paragraph of the chapter, he lets rip this cannonball of a
sentence:
Kitty looked into his face, which was so close to her own, and long afterwards—for several years after—that look [her look!:], full of love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an agony of shame.
That is the kind of sentence that deserves its own novel; that is the kind of sentence that keeps me plowing through this particular novel, because as soon as I read it, I became certain that Anna Karenina would be that novel. ]]>
Jonathan
took the never-ending book quiz.
| questions answered: | 2 |
| correct: | 2 (100.0%) |
| skipped: | 0 |
| best streak: | 2 |
| questions added: | 0 |
bookshelves: currently-reading
See my selected quotes and insights at my Secret City blog ]]>
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by William Easterly
Interesting book and I am sympathetic to his arguments, but praise should be tempered after recent research shows that social-marketing of mosquito nets (his keystone argument) has not actually been very successful. ]]>
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