I've been reading Anna Karenina all summer (thanks for the free ibook, iTunes!). Pretty much the only thing I knew about it before I started is that it ends tragically. I'm now on screen 2603 of 3197, and I keep waiting for the tragedy. Anything that happens in this book I am ready to see as foreshadowing. They go hunting, I anticipate them shooting each other. They go mushroom picking, I foresee the obliteration of a whole family by way of food poisoning. I am trying to talk myself out of this permadread but it's getting worse as I approach the novel's end. Something massively bad must be around the corner.

The other thought I keep having is that I shouldn't prepare myself for a post-modern ironic sort of tragedy--such as the aforementioned mass poisoning--but consider more 19th century Russian types of tragedy, which, of course, must be based in romance, rather than banality. We'll see.