Rinse the Tolstoy Off

It’s Tuesday, and the kids are back at school. I should catch up on laundry I didn’t do over the long weekend, I should load the dishwasher, I know as soon as breakfast settles I’m sure for a run in the rain. So much to do, an empty house to do it in…

…but all I want to do is write this funny little book about a woman who buys a cursed ring for a Halloween party and ends up with a smartmouth, extremely hot genie. Oh, and another one about an amulet maker. I can see today is going to be a Pomodoro timer type of day.

So. I read The Kreutzer Sonata Variations after I read War & Peace, and I have to say, Tolstoy is kind of ruined for me. It seems like his hypocrisy and misogyny just got more and and more virulent as he aged, which should not surprise me, but somehow I expected…more from him.

I know, I know, product of his time, and all that. The same man who wrote the heartbreaking scene where Rostopchin gives the poor boy to the crowd can contain the same man who wrote the ugliness of the protagonist of the Kreutzer Sonata, human beings are complex as fuck. It’s going to take a while for me to be able to read more Tolstoy without being furious, though.

I’ve shifted to Taken at the Flood–not Agatha Christie, but an examination of the Roman conquest of Greece. I am amused that one of the reviews calls it “biased” and says “read Polybius and Livy instead.” As if those two weren’t a weensy bit biased themselves. (This is like not realizing that Shakespeare was writing for a Tudor audience and had to badmouth the Plantagenets.) I had mad thoughts of attempting the Brothers Karamazov, but I think I need to rinse the Tolstoy off before I can manage more Russian lit. Generally Dostoevsky is more my type, but still.

So. Wordcount with a genie, then running, then setting my timer and alternating between more writing and the work of keeping the household from sinking into a mire of filth. All in all, I’m swamped. Which is, after all, just the way I like it.

Onward and inward, then.