It was a difficult decision, but I think it's going to have to be Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Many thanks for all the input and excellent suggestions, and of course I will continue on with my classics reading (hopefully including some of those recommendations), but the time just feels right to start Anna K.
I've got the lovely deluxe Penguin edition translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which comes highly recommended by Eva at A Striped Armchair, and since she studies Russian, I'll take her word for it. Also I found my copy in a used bookstore for less than half the original price, so that's an added bonus.
The story: "Anna Karenina has beauty, social position, wealth, a husband, and an adored son, but her existence seems empty. When she meets the dashing officer Count Vronsky she rejects her marriage and turns to him to fulfill her passionate nature--with devastating results. One of the world's greatest novels, Anna Karenina is both an immortal drama of personal conflict and social scandal and a vivid, richly textured panorama of nineteenth-century Russia."
I plan on starting today and hopefully posting each Sunday on my progress. The chapters seems quite short, so I think I should easily be able to read a bit each day. I'm in no rush to finish the book, and with 815 pages in my edition I expect I'll be reading it for a while. If I spend all summer with Anna, that's fine by me. And if I find I can't put the book down and fly right through it, that's fine, too. So, no schedule, no huge expectations, just hopefully many happy hours spent in the company of Anna Karenina and her Russian society.
I realize many/most of you are already loaded down with your own reading plans, so I will only say that if anyone wants to read along with me that would be wonderful. It would be nice to have a few people to talk about the book with and help keep things on track. And if you've already read the book, please do check in as I am sure I will have questions and comments.
So, to start:
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."