The Bookbat

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Anna Arkadyevna read and understood; but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about the room of a sick man; if she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she longed to be delivering the speech; if she read of how Lady Mary had ridden after the hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had surprised everyone by her boldness, she too wished to be doing the same. But there was no chance of doing anything; and twisting the smooth paper-knife in her little hands, she forced herself to read.

The hero of the novel was already almost reaching his English happiness, a baronetcy and an estate, and Anna was feeling a desire to go with him to the estate, when she suddenly felt that he ought to feel ashamed, and that she was ashamed of the same thing. But what had he to be ashamed of?

Anna Karenina, obvs. 2011 might be remembered as the year when so many books caught me at just the right time. There was Infinite Jest this summer when the world looked like an interlocking system of black miracles, and a whole string of Jennifer Egan novels this past month when I was trying to solve the mystery of really, really, really wanting something to the point where you just want to keep wanting it, and now this—which is quite a disorienting thing to read when your brain insists on intercutting it with, actually, never mind.