Brave New Year

First, I'd like to thank the wonderful little r for creating this blog. Secondly, I'd like to thank her for inviting me to contribute to it. And thirdly, I'd like to thank myself, for making it possible for me to be here today, reading and writing for this blog.

The Penguin Classic challenge is one will force us to span the breadth of known Western history in a way that we really should have in college but were likely too intoxicated to do so. Though it is a blatant marketing device meant to increase brand loyalty to the Penguin publishing business, it is a damn clever one, and one that I don't particularly mind participating in. However, as a last testament to my formerly anti-corporate ways, I will make a point to buy versions not published by Penguin throughout the duration of the challenge. This will be difficult for the more obscure texts, but we'll see.

I'll be honest, I haven't compiled my alphabetical list yet, but I work better in a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants sort of environment anyway. Breaking the mold, I've started in the T's with Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's oft-claimed best novel of all time.

Tracing the romantic and catastrophic exploits of multiple couples, Anna, according to the introductory text, is a moral statement about love, fidelity, and how shit just doesn't work out sometimes. The book's namesake, the super-high class woman Anna Karenina, ruins her life having an affair with the young hotshot Vronksy. At the same time, her brother is sleeping around with chamber maids, and two innocent lovebirds Levin and Kitty do a joyous and awkwardly cute lovedance that has lasted 400 pages so far. With truly brilliant insights into each character's thought process, we see a whole range of possible love situations for people living in 19^th century upper class pre-Soviet Russia. Oh, and I'm pretty sure Anna offs herself by the end, probably by jumping in front of a train (when Anna and Vronsky first meet, someone gets hit by a train and dies. I'm predicting this was a bit of foreshadowing.)

So yeah, it's about upper class people that have lots of time to mope, pine, think, and do whatever it is upper class people do when they aren't ordering servants around and waiting for the Bolshevik revolution to ruin their way of life. (Apparently a lot of that free time is spent philandering.) Tolstoy was upper-class-ish himself, and the inspiration for his main character came from gossip he heard about a woman in a nearby town.

I'm halfway through, and can have more thoughts later. Only 407 pages to go in my Oxford World Classic copy (look at my lack of brand loyalty!)

I look forward to what the Year of the Penguin has in store.

Says the Penguin: "2010! That's my shit."