Revisiting 'Anna Karenina'

Summer used to be a retreat from required reading, but now maybe it’s time we use it to pay the classics another visit. New Yorker film critic David Denby revealed on the magazine’s website that he’s deep in Tolstoy’s classic, Anna Karenina. Much of the epic novel deserves a second read, Denby says. “People always ask how seemingly sane people could do something crazy, like commit suicide,” Denby writes. “Tolstoy shows you how that is possible—it’s all there in Anna’s growing conviction that Vronsky is betraying her.”