Anna Karenina, or every unhappy family

We come for Anna and stay for Levin. Tolstoy braids the two stories so tightly that you almost don't notice he's written a novel about how to live disguised as a novel about how love ruins us.

Anna's tragedy is enormous and operatic; Levin's happiness is small and agricultural and somehow more radical. A man mows a field for a day and the prose goes quiet and clean, as if the book itself were relieved to stop watching the city destroy someone.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

It is the most generous of the great novels — Tolstoy refuses to let even his minor characters be only one thing. Everyone is given a morning, a doubt, a flash of grace.

Long, yes. But long the way a season is long: you don't want it to be shorter, you want to be inside it.