Last New Year, I made a resolution to increase the number of cells in my brain by reading, or rereading, the classic novels.
This did not include anything written by Stephen King or J. K. Rowling.
The authors on this list included, of course, Jane Austen (my personal favorite), Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leon Uris, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Gustave Flaubert, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to name a few.
I've read War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Exodus, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, Madame Bovary, etc.
Right now I am slogging my way through Anna Karenina, by Tolstoy. I took a couple of days off to read Glenn Beck's An Inconvenient Truth--which I loved (thank you to my stepson, Will, for gifting me with this book)--but now I am back to slogging.
Parts of the book are quite exciting--some others, not so much. It has been classed as the greatest novel ever written and Tolstoy considered it his best work.
I dispute none of that.
I just wish the character's names weren't so confusing: Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky is married to Darya Alexandrovna, Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin is in love with Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya, Anna Arkadyevna Karenina is married to Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, but is in love with Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky, who has also captured the affections of Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya.
Not a Joe or Bob in the bunch.
Tolstoy originally released this novel in serial installments between 1873 and 1877 in a Russian Periodical.
It may take me four years to get through this one, but I will do it. Just to be able to say I read it.
I think the next book may be See Spot Run.
As for this New Year's resolution: I'm taking up coloring.
