I read Anna Karenina for the first time in 1992, in the second semester of my freshman year in college. I loved it, but was never moved to read it a second time. There are a lot of books in the world, after all, and not nearly enough time to get to everything I want to read. It’s the very rare book that I read a second time.
Finding a free edition of Anna Karenina for my Kindle inspired me to give it another read. I’m now determined to change that re-reading policy. Better to read fewer books more deeply, I think. I loved Anna Karenina, sure, but I was eighteen years old. I loved it without any true understanding of what I was reading. I found her sympathetic, was caught up in her romance, thrilled to the tragedy of it, and that was it.
This time I found a much more complex book. It’s about the romance between Anna and Vronsky, sure, but it’s also about other marriages, other romances… It explores the themes of love, marriage, motherhood, faith, death, politics, family… This book seems to contain everything. EVERYTHING. It’s titled Anna Karenina, but it’s only partly her story. And within that story of hers, Tolstoy manages to make her sympathetic, then unsympathetic, then sympathetic again–through her love for her son, a clever move there–and then once again unsympathetic and finally, utterly pathetic and pitiable. Which is to say…she’s full and real and human in a way I didn’t appreciate the first time. Ditto for Levin. I didn’t understand why Levin’s storyline even existed the first time I read it. Now I see the book is great thanks to its several story lines and the way they fit together to form the greater argument about love and marriage. I’m also seeing how much the story of my current novel-in-progress (Cold Black Stars, for those of you who’ve been around here for a while) owes to Karenina.
I’m shaking my head and smiling condescendingly toward my younger self and what she thought this book was. And yes, I’m likely to do the same to the reader I am now if I read this book again in eighteen years. All the more reason to re-read. We bring who we are into each book we read. A great book will change as we do, I think. (Which is why, I suspect, the professor with whom I read all of In Search of Lost Time re-reads it every ten years. I promised him I would do the same, and so am scheduled to once again climb that mountain in a little over three years, at forty.)
I finished Karenina last night and now I’ve moved on to Madame Bovary, which I also read and loved that year. After that, The Scarlet Letter, which I haven’t read since I was fourteen.
The summer of infidelity, you see. I’m pretty damn excited about it.
What books did you love when you were younger that maybe merit a re-reading?
reminds me of a similar experience with crime and punishment. i’m not sure what i thought it was when i read it at 20, but i know it changed the way i thought of novels, of the experience of reading a novel. reread it last year. still love it.
I slogged my way through Wuthering Heights in high school and didn’t much appreciate it. I read it again ten years later and really enjoyed it – I had much more of an understanding of what they were going through. Now that it’s been a bunch more years maybe I’ll try it again.
Wuthering Heights was something I read in college and thought terribly romantic, but a recent re-read gave me an entirely different perspective, and I ended up appreciating it much more.
In college I also read Charlotte Bronte’s Villette and thought it was a snore. But an online read-along last year convinced me to try it again, and voila–age again gave me a completely different view of the book, and now I’d rank it among my all-time favorites.
I was shocked when I re-read “The Bell Jar” as an adult, and not a college sophomore looking only for the suicidal poetess. It actually had a lot of humor that I completely missed while I was wearing black turtlenecks and trying to be tragic.
I read The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing when I was 18 and thought it was the most deeply felt, emotionally honest book I’d ever read, and it instantly became my favorite. Having gone through my own romantic and political experiences, I’d love to re-read it and see if it still rang as true to me now. I also think I’d appreciate Faulkner a lot more.
I reread the Pevear and Vohlkonsky translation of AK when it came out a few years ago. It’s a beautiful, beautiful translation. All their translations kill me dead.
I reread constantly and one summer reread Brothers Karamazov on the bus three times about 11 years ago. It was an odd summer.
I should probably reread The Mayor of Castorbridge, Camus’ The Plague, and Beryl Markham’s haunting memoir West with the Night. I keep meaning to reread Gödel, Escher, Bach too and that one is a doozy.
Right now I’m going to read the possibly trashy Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife and then I plan to delve into David Mitchell’s daunting Cloud Atlas.
Although at the moment I am reading Medusa, solving the mystery of the gorgon, which is fascinating and research of course.
And I would like to reread Faulkner’s Go Down Moses (one of my favorites) and Virginia Woolf’s essays.
I loved Of Human Bondage when I was younger and am curious how it will read this time since I am older and view the world differently.
Ha, we’re having a Tolstoy summer here as well – we’re reading the recent translation of War and Peace aloud to each other. And you’re right, I have a whole different appreciation of its strengths, as well as awareness of its weaknesses. I have to laugh at the earnest 20-something-year-old that was once me getting in a heated argument with a literate business associate more than twice my age because it was so *obvious* to me that Dostoevsky was infinitely superior to Tolstoy. I wonder if I had any idea what I was talking about.
I am a huge fan of re-reading! I rest Iris Murdoch’s first novel “Under the Net” when I was in college a million years ago, and have since read all her novels. Under the Net remains my favorite, and it improves with each re-reading, every 5 years or so. There’s so much I missed or did not get on the first reading.
Francine Prose talks about re-reading in her book, “Reading Like a Writer” (available as a Kindle book for $5 and change) and how books bring us something new because we are different people when we read them again. I started re-reading some classics this year — like you “The Scarlet Letter” but also “Tale of Two Cities” and “Hedda Gabler”.
Glad you’re back online. I missed you. I know you’re busy but I like to hear what you’ve gotta say.
You with your shocker post titles!! I was like, “OMG, she just had a baby and he’s cheating on her — AND SHE’S BLOGGING ABOUT IT?!!” Glad you’re having a VICARIOUS summer of infidelity. 😉
Hmm… There are two books I might give another chance to someday, and I didn’t make it past the first chapter in either one. Usually I’m so damned stubborn that I force myself to finish every book., even if it sucks. But Atlas Shrugged really annoyed me; I couldn’t connect with it and I felt like the characters were “fake,” and each of them was only there so that Ayn Rand could go on and on about her ideas while pretending to tell a story… But this was back in those hazy college days when you were reading Anna Karenina.
The other one is James Joyce’s Ulysses, which also annoyed me because it seemed like it was written in weird gibberish for no literary purpose. Kind of like The Emperor’s New Clothes: It’s a Great Treasure, but fools can’t see the beauty of it and no one wants to admit she’s a fool… That’s what I decided at the time, when I gave myself permission to abandon it after a few pages.
But yes, I probably just wasn’t ready for either of these at the time. Now you have inspired me to give one of them a go. Have you read either book, and if so, did you enjoy them?
I love Margaret Atwood & I try to reread her regularly. Cat’s Eye is truly fantastic. I’ve read the Lord of the Rings trilogy 3 times & will read it many more times in my life. I loved the Anne of Green Gables series as a child & just reread them all post-partum (when I wanted something warm & romantic) & they were totally delightful & compelling. Perhaps I’ll try to read Anna Karenina again now that you’ve prompted me – I read all of Dickens in my teens & I think I’d like to explore his books again.
I love the line in Anna Karenina that is something like “All happy families are the same, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I took many Russian lit classes in college and read lots of Tolstoy – mostly in Russian – and adored his short stories. I am trying to revive my Russian by rereading some of those stories and planning on rereading Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita in Russian (with the translation side-by-side).
Part of my love for Tolstoy may have been the professor – I was the only one in his classes and we would just read and talk together, often about bees and ants. One of the things I remember most about him was how he would say “You are like cinnamon!” and then after a few beats, until you knew what the rest of the praise was, “You’re on a roll!”
I wonder how I’ll feel in 10 years when I give Ayn Rand another shot. I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged a couple years ago and found them to be very entertaining. I like books about conspiracies and the whole thing was so melodramatic and silly to me with everyone running around behind the scenes orchestrating and manipulating everything and everyone else. Oh, and then there was the whole part about shunning collectivism in Atlas Shrugged but then her main characters went off and formed…a collective. I’m not sure if Rand missed the point or I did, but I’m interested to see how I feel about these books later.
I was 17 when I read “The Stranger” for the first time and I re-read it every few years and I’m still not sure I understand it. I’m about due for another go ’round.
I read “Walk Two Moons” by Sharon Creech when I was 8 or 9. It didn’t really mean much to me then, but then I read it when I was 16 (after my mom died) and suddenly it made a lot of sense. It’s a YA novel about a 13 year old girl and her grieving process after her mother’s death. I read it again when I was 19 for a paper for my English class and it sparked a desire to re-read most of the books I’d loved as a kid.
I just picked up Anna Karenina at a yard sale–I have never read it and am trying to capture the classics I have missed. I read My Antonia! earlier this year and am very glad i did. Thanks for the post–I am going to put AK higher on the reading pile.
When I was in college my roommate lent me Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins. It was one of those books that I re-read frequently for about five years. Now I come back to it every couple of years. Twenty years ago I thought it was gob smacking brilliant, not so much now. I do still think it is one of his better novels.
Maybe I should go back and actually read Madame Bovary – I know I just skimmed it in college!
But, while The Scarlet Letter is about “illicit” sex, there is no infidelity, at least not to marriage vows. I guess infidelity to your own soul is worse.
Hmm…two books come to mind for me. The first is The Bell Jar. The second is Cold Sassy Tree. My younger self loved those.
Les Miserables. Unabridged. Victor goes off on tangents but he covers the history of his time and it was fascinating to me. His account of events was written about 20 years after they happened, so still somewhat fresh in mind and his is considered to be the closest we have to a first-person account. I am currently trying to get into Hunchback, but it hasn’t nabbed me yet although I’ve read (or listened to) the first couple of chapters about 3 times.
Also, The Count of Monte Cristo, unabridged. I want the full story, not the plot, so I trudge through the unabridged versions.
I read one of Tolstoy’s books in my Russian History class in college (30 yrs ago), but can’t remember which one. I will have to revisit him. Just got an IPad so this is a good candidate for IBooks!
Thanks for the reading nudges. I default to mystery stories off the new books shelf at the library. Time to get out of this lazy habit.
I re-read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy an awful lot… It’s less highbrow than everyone else’s choices, but I care not a jot.
I finished Anna Karenina recently and told my father he had to read it. Now I’m reading Vanity Fair.
Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” which I not only read while I was in my very unworldly early twenties, but also in French (I was living there, it was pre-Amazon, and books in English were thin on the ground). As I read it, I was very aware of how much I was NOT understanding, but fell in love with it anyway. It is one of the few things I still possess from that period in my life, and it is tucked away until the time feels right for me to savor it again.
I re-read Anna a few months ago. The first time I was 19 and taking, Russian Cultural History so we must have been talking about 19th C bourgeoisie types. This time around, Anna made me angry. I lost my sympathy for her. She should have stuck around being miserable and raised those children. Pretty soon I’ll pick up Buddenbrooks by T Mann- another tale of reckless romanticism.
A few summers ago I reread the books that we had to read freshman year of high school. At 13, I had absolutely no idea that Pride and Prejudice was funny. And Ethan Frome–completely different book at 40 than at 13. It was pretty amazing.
Willa Cather. I read The Song of the Lark or The Professor’s House every few years. I reread My Antonia last year and it is great, but the other two are my favorites.