Made of Library

I began Anna Karenina thinking it was a love story. There is a love story within the pages of this novel, but I don’t think it involves the title character. Perhaps I just came into this reading with incorrect preconceptions about what to expect.  Anna Karenina is really the story of three relationships. There are Anna and Vronsky, Kitty and Levin, and Dolly and Stiva. The tangle of connections between these six people is what the novel is really about. As you’re introduced to more characters in the story you build up something like a family tree, literally for some of the characters, but it also shows the wider network of associations of who knows who and how. I find this gradual building up of complexity draws me into the novel and brings the world to life. The biggest surprise in reading this was the precision with which Tolstoy conveyed the women’s emotions, especially when they had been, or thought they had been, betrayed by their partner. The opening section of the nov...

Barry Marshall knew that he was dead. He’d been expecting it for some time, and now that he was looking down at his own body he knew with a certainty that it had finally happened. He was disgusted by what he saw in the bed before him. The slack jaw hanging open, chin covered in drool. The fat stomach, the flaky scalp, the skin wrinkled all over like old wrapping paper. He was glad to finally be dead. Death wasn’t what he’d expected though. He wasn’t a religious man, so he hadn’t thought that he’d be off to heaven or hell or that place inbetween. He honestly just thought it would be nothing. He’d die and that would be the end of it. He wouldn’t be aware that he was dead, his consciousness would just blink out of existence. Now that Barry Marshall was dead he didn’t know what to do. Should he stick close to his corporeal body? He didn’t want to go too far in case they moved it and he didn’t know if his ghost, spirit, whatever he was now, was somehow linked to his physical remains...