Elusive to the End

Although I have spent much of my working life reviewing fiction, interviewing authors, and giving talks to book clubs, there are embarrassing gaps in my reading history. Forget Moby-Dick, Ulysses, or Infinite Jest. There was a time when the list included Anna Karenina.

Somehow, I had never been forced to study Count Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece, and because Anna Karenina was too weighty to fit into a satchel, and too significant to join the lighter reading by my bedside, the novel from 1878 kept falling through the literary cracks. Then, twenty years ago, I won a journalism fellowship at Massey College in the University of Toronto. Imagine: eight months away from the newsroom while I traded daily deadlines for a more relaxed curriculum of my choosing — and on a stipend.

When a scheduling conflict meant I had a hole in my program, I saw an opportunity to catch up finally with Anna Karenina. I vaguely knew...