Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
I am currently reading Anna Karenina. I had been determined to read it in 2022, but life happened, and I started listening to the audiobook on January 1. Before that, I had read nothing for months--I had a difficult, tiring 2022, and when I had downtime, I didn't want to read; I wanted to stare at mindless TV. When things eased up, I found I was out of the habit of reading, and still preferred mindless TV (and I really mean mindless). I thought Anna would jumpstart me--that I'd be motivated to finish it so I could read some nice little domestic thriller--but that's not happening. I've read a few chapters a day of Anna, and I'm only about halfway through Part Three (of eight).
The audiobook is actually good--it's the Maude translation with Wanda McCaddon as the narrator. The language seems sufficiently modern, and I don't have to deal with the strange-to-me names that defy pronunciation, which has been a stumbling block in my previous halfhearted attempts to read Anna. I'm enjoying it, not just feeling virtuous about finally reading the darn thing after blowing it off in high school back in the Dark Ages. But I still don't want to read more than a few chapters at a time.
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The names can be problematic. I've read War and Peace three times so I'm familiar with how Russian names are done, having read intros i both books describing how they do their names. I was reading a more recent translation and the maddening thing is that x-ray won't always pick up on a particular form of someone's name if I want to look up a character, so it requires a good understanding of how names are handled.