Welcome to From the Front Porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South.

All happy families are alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. We are Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.

I'm Annie V. Jones, owner of the bookshelf, an independent bookstore in beautiful downtown Thomasville, Georgia.

And today, I'm joined by my friend and bookstagrammer Hunter McClendon as we talk about Anna Karenina, the book we've been reading for our Conqueror Classic series on Patreon.

We just wrapped up our final episode of Conqueror Classic on Patreon. We have been reading Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina all year long, like literally all year long.

And we just finished section eight, part eight of the book and recorded our final episode. And now we're here to talk a little bit about it with a broader range of readers.

How do you feel? Honestly, I'm mostly just excited to like, I don't know, I'm excited just to be here.

We are going to approach this kind of in a different way. So on Patreon, we have been reading each part of Anna Karenina per month. So over the last eight to 10 months, we've read all eight parts. And then we've been recapping them.

This is going to be a little different. This is going to be where we obviously talk about the overarching themes of Anna Karenina, but specifically we're going to talk about where we see Anna Karenina in pop culture.

And this kind of comes from this idea that the conversations you and I were having, we also were tying into things like the office or sex in the city.

So that's what today is going to be like. So hopefully if you've read Anna Karenina, you can join in the fun. And even if you haven't, there will be enough like pop cultural touchstones where this will be a familiar conversation to you. So let's dive in, shall we?

I'm a pump.

Okay, I do want to take a page out of like our old love it or low fit days or backless book club. Can you like briefly recap this 800 page novel and just tell people what is Anna Karenina about?

Okay, Anna Karenina is about a bunch of unhappy people who are trying to figure out their life and then a happy couple who have it all together, but specifically Anna Karenina is unhappy with her marriage so she cheats on her husband and it's about how everything spirals out from there.

Excellent. You did that in like less than a minute, which is very impressive.

I was like, how can I do this? Like, what's my elevator pitch?

Okay, so I am going to start with who really based on our conversations, we now, I think we agree on this, that the main character of Anna Karenina is not actually Anna Karenina.

But this side character who winds up becoming in my view, the main protagonist or kind of the soul of the book for better or worse, I'm not saying it's entirely a good thing.

But it's this character named Levin. Do you agree that Levin becomes kind of the center point of the book?

Yeah, I do.

I can tell you don't feel great about that.

It's not maybe our favorite thing, but I do think it is the reality.

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