Anna Karenina: the joy of long books

In a possibly ill-advised move, I decided yesterday that I wanted to read Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina before the new film adaptation (starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law; trailer below).  Armed with a disgracefully cheap Wordsworth Classics copy, I quickly got to work on its 806 pages.  Unfortunately, it quickly emerged that (presumably to cut costs) the publisher had used the smallest font possible.  The nine days until the film release suddenly don't seem so long.

Now, I'm no stranger to long books.  With an English degree behind me I've tucked away 20 Victorian novels in a term, as well as chewing through James Joyce's Ulysses and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (the longest poem in English, I believe).  I only drew the line at Clarissa by Samuel Richardson, which comes in at a smidgeon under a million words - in my defence I had to write about the almost-as-long Tom Jones and the not insubstantial Pamela in the same week, and I ended up writing an essay on why Clarissa's length made it impossible to study.  But I digress.  (Much like Tolstoy.)