Mrs. Dalloway's Coffee Break

1. This time of year, I always think of my home girl Anna Karenina. There is something about the oncoming winter months, the gorgeous melancholy of the turning seasons, the endless cups of rose and strawberry scented tea, the Russian dolls on my mantelpiece, and of course the late fall wardrobe consisting of gold and deep hues of green and burgundy that make me long to be on the pages of her misfortune. A lot of people say that the first time they read Anna Karenina, they loved her story, and were all but flipping the pages forward, hurrying through Konstantin Levin’s babblings on the working class and ideas of happiness and the great Russian escape, the bliss of the countryside, as opposed to the superficial values and evil siren calls of the great cities, because who cared about these boring issues, right? The second time was all about Levin’s story, and the reader started to see how important he was for the whole unraveling of events, as Anna’s mirror, her counterpart, th