My serious intellectual pretensions as a fourteen year old meant that, when browsing through a Manila bookshop and exhausted by my family's marathon shopping trip, Anna Karenina was an obvious choice. I knew of Tolstoy from his infamously long novel and historical study War and Peace, which was, I conceived, the ultimate must-read for any aspiring literary snob. And though there it sat on the retail shelf, its skyscrapering reputation and formidable size overwhelmed my teenage head. Next to it, however, sat a shorter, though still sizable, novel with a beguiling black-haired beauty on its cover. I believed this would be the novel that would get me acquainted to the particularly heavy flavour of Russian literature. When I parted the hallowed leaves of fresh paper, I soon realised that this was no appetiser. Almost from the first tasty bite of the novel's famous first sentence, I realised I was at a literary Circe's banquet, and I would never want to escape.
