I did it. I finally picked up this beast after buying it two years ago. I have the pretty Barnes and Noble leather edition and I ended up listening to the audiobook for THREE WEEKS!!! I listened to the public domain audio recordings and I listened to them on the highest speed possible and I wish there was a faster speed because at two times speed, this book was still a SNOOZE FEST!
Going into it, I thought it would be the life of the woman Anna Karenina. It's not that at all. It is about Russian aristocracy and their lives dealing with love and scandal. There is another couple we follow who was not that interesting. The characters are always referred to by first and last name and it was hard to keep characters separated because they had no substance. They were all the same. It has a really crappy love triangle aspect that was abandoned very quickly.
Anna was a jealous hypocrite and a shitty mother. She got her sister in law to stay with her husband who cheated with the kids governess and then Anna turns around and cheats on her husband and ends up getting knocked up. She didn't love that baby as much as her son and she ends up resenting the baby and she refuses a divorce, and then years later asks for one and she gets denied. She has severe mental health issues and she is a ruined woman because she went after love and she commits suicide to make her lover Vronsky feel bad and miss her and take fault and then her husband ends up taking her and Vronsky's daughter who is legally his by the marriage and not by blood.
When I was in the home stretch and had 150 pages left, I was completely over this book. I did not care about the characters what so ever and I was bored with their lives and their judgments and prejudices and the customs.
I did get the movie from the library because Kiera Knightly is such a great actress and she does period dramas really well. Let's hope it's another case of ADAPTATION IS BETTER THAN THE BOOK.
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