6 January 2026

Anna Karenina opens with one of the most quoted lines in literature, about happy families all being alike, and then spends eight hundred pages proving that unhappiness is endlessly, fascinatingly specific. Tolstoy gives you two love stories running in parallel, one that burns fast and destroys everything it touches, and one that grows slowly, awkwardly, into something that actually works, and the genius of the book is refusing to tell you which kind of love is more real. Read this when you want a big, absorbing world to disappear into for a few weeks, one with balls and racehorses and farmland and trains, but also one that understands desire and social suffocation with uncomfortable precision. Anna herself is magnetic and infuriating in equal measure; you'll be angry with her and desperately on her side in the same chapter. This is a classic novel that still holds up as one of the most honest portraits of what happens when passion collides with a society that has no place for it. Pace yourself with the Levin sections if you're impatient for Anna's story; they're doing something quieter about faith, work, and contentment that pays off beautifully by the end. Best read in long sittings rather than snatched minutes, it's a book that rewards immersion. Keep it for a season when you have room in your life for a genuinely enormous novel, because once it gets its hooks in you, you won't want to be pulled away from it.