The WPL is thrilled to have a Weston High School intern, Vionna, helping us with all sorts of things this spring. Lucky for us, she is  a voracious reader. We asked her to help us rediscover a love of the classics- here are two of her favorites that she recommends revisiting.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
“He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.”

Set during the late 19th century at the turn of the Russian Empire, Anna Karenina is a true epic of Western literature. Tolstoy thrusts his reader into the glittering world of the Russian aristocracy not only to follow the unraveling of Anna’s scandal of marital infidelity, but to also listen in on intellectual debates about politics, agriculture, and philosophy. In this novel Tolstoy forces his readers to question their perceptions of propriety, sacrifice, duty, family, and love from a vast number of perspectives. Tolstoy leaves his readers with no easy conclusions or a clear moral message; Anna’s story is complicated, and every character in this book is layered and flawed. The cast of Anna Karenina will live inside you long after you’ve finished this novel, and there’s nothing more heartbreaking than taking that sad train ride with Anna near the end of the novel. There’s a reason that this novel is hailed as one of the greatest novels of all time, and that’s because it really stands as a masterpiece in investigating the broad scope of the human condition.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” 

Austen is sort of the best friend that we all wish we could have. In every line of Pride and Prejudice, Austen’s charming wit and humor leap off of the page to the point that even the most ill humored of us can’t help but chuckle. In Pride and Prejudice Austen satirizes the traditional mindset prevalent in the early 1800s about women’s place in society. Extremely radical for its time, Pride and Prejudice boldly asserts that a woman should only act in such a way that she believes will constitute her own personal happiness (woah, right?). Besides reading Pride and Prejudice for literary merit, it’s also just a really fun read with a hilarious cast of characters from Mr. Collins to Mrs. Bennet. With millions of adaptations from the 1995 BBC series to the 2003 Keira Knightley movie to Bridget Jones’s Diary, there’s a reason this whimsical story has stood the test of time to become the basis of most modern romantic comedies.