Winners: Anna Karenina Giveaway


Yesterday marked the close of the Focus Features Anna Karenina giveaway! Thanks for participating, everyone who...participated (and for the international readers out there, I'll be running another giveaway for the holidays that is open to everyone).

SO! Without further ado, the winners of a movie tie-in edition of Anna Karenina, as well as the movie's soundtrack, a votive candle, and a bookmark are: Lauren Ozanich  and Amanda (akpatchin), selected by random.org. I've sent you two e-mails to get your mailing addresses, which I will then forward on to the movie promotion company and they'll be mailing you your prizes.

Congrats to the winners!


Anna Karenina Giveaway

So the kind reps of Focus Features contacted me about sponsoring this here giveaway in support of the upcoming release of the new Anna Karenina movie (by sponsoring I mean they're providing the prizes, not that they've paid me or anything). I said HECK TO THE YES because AK is easily one of my top five favorite novels and I want to get copies into people's hands, whether they have Keira Knightley's face on the cover or no.



Movie Info

Trailer n' shiz.

Release Date:                          November 16, 2012
Nationwide Release:               November 30, 2012
Studio:                                     Focus Features
Starring:                                  Keira Knightley, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jude Law, Matthew Macfadyen, Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Kelly Macdonald, Ruth Wilson, Olivia Williams, and Emily Watson
Directed By:                           Joe Wright (“Pride & Prejudice”, “Atonement”)
Written By:                            Tom Stoppard (“Shakespeare in Love”)

"Anna Karenina is acclaimed director Joe Wright’s bold, theatrical new vision of the epic story of love, stirringly adapted from Leo Tolstoy’s great novel by Academy Award winner Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love). The film marks the third collaboration of the director with Academy Award-nominated actress Keira Knightley and Academy Award-nominated producers Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, and Paul Webster, following their award-winning box office successes Pride & Prejudice and Atonement."


Giveaway Info

The giveaway is limited to U.S. participants only (sorry, I know, but I didn't make the rules for this one- I will be running another classics giveaway in December like I always do and that will be international).

So! Two winners will get a movie tie-in edition of Anna Karenina (Lousie and Alymer Maude translation), along with the movie's soundtrack and a Votivo candle and bookmark. 

To Enter- Just leave your name and e-mail address in the comments below between now and November 26. I will draw two random winners on November 27th. I'll e-mail the winners and get your shipping address, which I'll then send to the movie promoters so they can ship your prizes out to you. 

I'd also appreciate it if you tweeted/Facebooked/whatevered the shiznit out of this because ALL THE PEOPLE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK. And you know what makes people read books a whole lot? WHEN THE BOOKS ARE FREE, AMIRITE (and also when they've seen a pretty movie with pretty people in it, maybe)? There are little buttons below this post for sharing on various social media type things. Anywoot, Godspeed, gentle readers. Or, you know, aggressive readers. Whatever gets your goat.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

My Meets-In-Real-Life-And-Drinks-Wine-And-Is-Supes-Fun book club selected The Moonstone for our December meeting, which I was ecstatic about because I am an honorary member of the Cult of Wilkie, having read and loved The Woman in White. This dude writes THE SHIT out of some campy Victorian mysteries.


So! The Moonstone is a Very Large Yellow Diamond stolen from the head of the statute of a Hindu moon god in India by a Very Nasty Englishman. The diamond makes its way back to England, where it ends up in the house of a posh, respectable family who do posh, respectable things. NATCH, the rock is cursed (ish) and all sorts of icky badness RAINS DOWN on the heads of our saucy heroine and her noble love interest. There is also a butler who opens to random pages of Robinson Crusoe when he needs wisdom (kinda like my grandma used to do with the Bible), and a clinically depressed reformed thief/wannabe temptress with a wonky shoulder, AND AND AND a band of ROVING ORIENTALS (Wilkie's word, that one) out to return the diamond to its rightful place at all costs. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT, PEOPLE?

Predictably, there is a good bit of ZEE ROMANCE a la Victoriana- you know what I mean, lots of tension that happens whilst doing something harmless like drinking tea or taking a walk. Lots of DECLARING OF LOVE at inopportune moments, lots of pining, lots of waiting hopelessly for years for your beloved, lots of self-sacrifice, etc., etc.


Impressively, the story is told from several first person points of view, so you get the history of the diamond from eye witnesses. Now, I knew Mr. Wilkie was the master of the sorta-tawdry-and-therefore-awesome mystery, but I did NOT know the man could write such distinct voices so well. We move from an aging butler to a religious fanatic spinster to a respectable lawyer to a charming rogue-hero type, and each character is completely distinguishable from the next. Whattaya know- you come for the murder/mayhem and you stay for the impressive literary skillz.

So, if you're ever in the market for a Charles Dickens-meets-Agatha-Christie-meets-melodramatic-gothic-novelist, Wilkie's your guy.

Four stars out of your mom, mostly because of the butler and the funny things he says about marriage.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

I embarked on a re-read of Slaughterhouse Five with Greg of New Dork Review of Books for Book Riot's Vonnegut Day (here's the post we wrote together about the experience, if you're interested) and man. That is one bleak read, which explains why I loved it so hard in high school (I also lurved it this time because it's darkly hilarious which is my favorite kind of hilarious and his prose is deceptively simple. Like Hemingway, if Hemingway was a total smart-ass and also made pencil drawings of boobs).


The resemblance, she is uncanny.

For those of you who didn't go through the requisite Vonnegut-lurve as an adolescent like the rest of us did, let me catch you up to speed here: in Slaughterhouse Five, the main character Billy Pilgrim is an accidentally-time-traveling (maybe) veteran of World War II who was present at the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, and who was also kidnapped by aliens (maybe). The aliens who (maybe) take Billy teach him that all of time has already happened at the same time that it is happening and at the same time that it is always happening, so each moment is both inevitable and inalterable. Vonnegut drives this point home by stating "So it goes" (you know, that most popular of hipster tattoos) anytime a character dies. In the fist meta-chapter, Vonnegut gives us a semi-or-maybe-totally-autobiographical account of how hard it was for him to finally write a book about Dresden, saying that writing an anti-war book is like writing an anti-glacier book. An uphill battle with little to no discernable results.


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So when I read this as a teenager, I took it very literally. Billy Pilgrim was a time traveling victim of alien abduction who was put in a zoo on another planet, and wars would happen because wars would happen because wars would happen because people are awful and do awful things and everyone sucks, let's drink some vodka and listen to Dashboard Confessional (before they [him] were cool). So that's one way to look at it.

Ten years later, I don't agree with my original interpretation (not just of the book, but of anything in life because everyone is wrong about everything at 16). There are a bunch of holes in the abducted-by-aliens sub-plot, and many of the things that Billy experiences while time traveling/space traveling show up in Kilgore Trout's sci-fi books, a detail I didn't notice or care about the first time around. I now think that Billy became "unstuck" in time as a way of escaping the moments he spent in Germany and the memories thereof (so they are essentially hallucinations), and that the alien view of time (the aliens also being hallucinations) is an excuse Billy (and the rest of humanity) tells itself in order to feel ok about something like genocide. 

Having read a lot of Vonnegut's other work, along with many of his interviews and letters, I still think he found war to be an inevitability because life is a bitch and people can be awful. But I don't think he was taking "so it goes" so far into fatalism as to be interpreted as a call to do nothing about it- it's an acknowledgment and maybe even a warning that your efforts may come to nothing. So yeah, the book is bleak and cynical and maybe opposing something like war is similar to opposing a glacier, but that's no reason why we shouldn't do it anyway. The opposing, I mean, not the warring.

Gotta love a man who makes his own GIFs.

Four stars out of your mom, both for nostalgia and for all the rest of it.