I have a ritual with my books – first, to come into possession of book (through some generous source as I rarely buy books), read/inhale/digest the book, write a deeply personal blog post on book, keep book on shelf (if I loved it)/donate book to library (if I didn’t love it)/give book away to anyone [...]
leo tolstoy
“All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” With these captivating words, the supreme Russian artist, Leo Tolstoy, opens his magnificent masterpiece, Anna Karenina, and grips at my heart from that first paragraph until the closing words, 963 pages later. It is impossible to express everything I felt [...]
The day that I stop improving upon the self is the day that I stop living. My problem has never been the lack of motivation in improving myself. I find myself drawn to self-improvement as bees to flowers or water to shore. No, my problem is bigger. It is the ever-present overwhelming feeling of just [...]
The Problem with Balance Seek balance in all things you do in life. This is the well-known and often-heard universal advice to many challenges and problems in life. Experts constantly encourage us to do all things in balance. Corporate life encourages a life-work balance attitude (as though work is not part of life, but maybe [...]
Reading Anna Karenina has been so overwhelming and gratifying that I chose to walk away from it for a short while. I decided to take time to digest the scope, the breadth, the depth in this masterpiece of a novel. It is of course an overly ambitious task to ever digest it all. This is [...]
In “What happened to Anna K.?“, Irina Reyn gives us the life of Anna Karenina in a new light. Reyn’s writing and story-telling was simply riveting. This brilliant young author had me captivated and glued to her book from page one. Reyn’s writing style is remarkable for such a new novelist. Her spellbinding way of [...]
