Anna Karenina by Leo TolstoyMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
What a book, what a book, what a book. If you read no other book in your life ....read this one.
It instructs deeply on the dangers of the "unexamined life". My very favorite person is Levin who sums up the political crisis of his day, which is startling similar to the partisan politics and the crisis of our day, when he says: "That word 'people' is so vague. Parish clerks, teachers and one in a thousand of the peasants, maybe, know what is's all about. The rest of the eighty million, like Mihalitch, far from expressing their will, haven't the faintest idea what there is for them to express their will about. What right have we to say that this is the people's will?"
Also, Levin, while watching children who were being destructive and who were disregarding advice and admonitions from adults, concludes: "they could not believe it indeed, for they could not take in the immensity of all they habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were destroying was the very thing they lived by."
He describes our society in 2014 with alarming accuracy. Then one realizes that the condition into which we are born has not changed much at all.
Old books deliver this message so much more powerfully than new ones.
Read Anna Karenina. You will be glad you did.
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