In her book "More Book Lust", Nancy Pearl writes that no one should ever finish a book that they're not enjoying, no matter how popular or well reviewed the book is, as nobody is going to get any points in heaven by miserably slogging their way through a book they aren't enjoying but think they ought to read.
She lives by what she calls "the rule of fifty", which is based on the reality of the shortness of time (or, in my case, the shortness of life!) and the immensity of the world of book (or, in my case, the many still unread books in my "anti-library"!) If you're fifty years old or younger, she says, give every book about fifty pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up. If you're over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100 - the result is the number of pages you should read before deciding whether or not to quit. (If you're 100 or over, you may even judge the book by its cover, despite the danger in doing so.)
Subtracting 77 from 100 leaves 23 which isn't much to judge a book by, but even that was too much to stick with Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina", despite its compelling opening lines, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way", which I could wholly relate to, and not because my family was a happy one; quite the contrary. As I wrote elsewhere, no one ever says, "Well, I have a happy home life, I'm rich and I have many friends - so I'm off to Australia."
But back to "Anna Karenina", widely considered to be one of the greatest works of literature ever written. One of biggest hurdles for me was the large number of characters and their complicated Russian names. The book could have been half its size had it not been for all those names like Prince Stepan Arkadievitch Oblonsky and Princess Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaya and Princess Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shtcherbatskaya, let alone the eponymous Anna Arkadievna Karenina, née Oblonskaya.
However, here's the good news: the Soviets turned the novel's 800 pages into a sumptuous movie, broken up, like the novel itself, into eight parts. There have been many other, and shorter, movie adaptations of the book but I've found this the most authentic, not least because it is entirely in Russian (but with English subtitles). I simply loved the cinematography and the music and even the language grew on me. Enjoy!
Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему. Vse schastlivyye sem'i pokhozhi drug na druga, kazhdaya neschastlivaya sem'ya neschastliva po-svoyemu.
