HAHA! I have gotten the better of you, Android Karenina!!
It took some plugging away, and more than one session of bribery to get there, and afterward I felt a bit sullied and unusual, but that’s NOT THE POINT. It’s done. Now I know why I gave up on Anna Karenina. Oh, Tolstoy.
So, without further ado:
For Week 4, I read Android Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy and Ben Winters. One of the several mash-ups of classic literature and fantasy or science fiction, this one…well. For starters, its base is in Russian literature, something I never did learn to fully appreciate, despite the exhortations of several professors. Not that they were huge fans either; it was the principle of the thing.
Here’s the trouble, for those of you who have never read Russian literature; it’s about suffering. It might be suffering of the body, but usually it’s about the mind, the soul, that je ne sais quoi that tortures us in the dark of the night. Or, in the case of Tolstoy, all the freaking time. It’s a bit of a downer. Adding robots and aliens didn’t change that much.
My first obstacle was really that there were clearly two different stories here, one layered on the other, and the second layer distracted me so much that I couldn’t pay attention to either one. The second obstacle was, of course, that it’s depressing. Watching someone spiral to suicide is never exactly cheerful.
It is finished. I might need some Terry Pratchett after this as a palate-cleanser.
