My Savory Summer Project

Famous first lines (there will be a quiz afterward):

All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Quick, what famous Russian novel starts with that sentence?

I'll admit, I'm sure I've heard that line somewhere before, but until I started reading Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina last week, I wouldn't have gotten that right, either.

It's a rather large novel: 332,757 words. According to the "text stats" listed for it on Amazon.com, 99 percent of novels have fewer words. One of the most recent Robert B. Parker Spenser mysteries, for example, Cold Service, is 50,247 words. I can (and have) read an entire Spenser novel in less than 24 hours (that's what happens when you're addicted, I guess).

I will not be plowing through Anna Karenina in one day. Or even several. This might take me most of the summer, and not only because this is a long and complex novel. I'm gonna want to savor this.

The titular character, although mentioned in Chapter II, does not appear until Chapter XVIII, so that when she does finally make her entrance, the delay, and the resultant expectation, only heightens Tolstoy's subtle yet evocative description of her:

The trained insight of a Society man enabled Vronsky with a single glance to decide that she belonged to the best Society. He apologized for being in her way and was about to enter the carriage, but felt compelled to have another look at her, not because she was very beautiful nor because of the elegance and modest grace of her whole figure, but because he saw in her sweet face as she passed him something specially tender and kind. Her bright grey eyes which seemed dark because of their black lashes rested for a moment on his face as if recognizing him, and then turned to the passing crowd evidently in search of some one. In that short look Vronsky had time to notice the subdued animation that enlivened her face and seemed to flutter between her bright eyes and a scarcely perceptible smile which curved her rosy lips. It was as if an excess of vitality so filled her whole being that it betrayed itself against her will, now in her smile, now in the light of her eyes. She deliberately tried to extinguish that light in her eyes, but it shone despite of her in her faint smile.

And, as Vronsky's passion for this strange woman begins, without him even being conscious if it, so too is the reader drawn to this enigma, of whom we know very little, but whom we also seem to be intimately familiar--or, at the very least, want to.