Anna Ekaterina Arkadyich Shcherbatskaya Whatsername...????

Number 10 on my list: Read Time Magazine's Ten Greatest Books of All Time

Here's the list:

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Happily, I have already read three of the above novels so I've already got a head start. But the titles that are still waiting in the wings are weighty and daunting and LONG.

So let's go.

Up first is Anna Karenina. So far it's not too bad but here's my issue... the names. Holy crap with the names. I need Spark Notes and a journal and a family tree just to keep everything straight. I though MY last name in all it's German glory was long. No, these Russian names are insane and incomprehensible and almost completely void of vowels.

Here are some examples:

Anna Arkadyevna Karenina
Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin
Konstantin Dmitrich Levin ( referred to as Konstantin Lenin or Lenin or Konstantin)
Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya (referred to as Kitty)
Stepan Arkadyich Oblonsky (referred to as Stiva or Oblansky or Stephan Arkadyich)
Prince Alexander Dmitrievich Shcherbatsky (sometimes Prince, sometimes Scherbatsky)

And those are just a few of the main characters, never mind the whole slew of minor characters that pop up along the way.

My mind is swimming. This is going to be slow going...

ETA: ACK! And I just found out that "In Search of Lost Time" is 7 Volumes totaling almost 4,000 pages. Haha! I'm going to be so proud of myself if I accomplish this.

--Shannon