Can we talk about the librarian who said I was reading Anna Karenina too fast?
A librarian in Boulder gave me that advice when I was 19, and I ignored her and plowed through it in 8 days, then felt nothing at the end except relief. Reread it slow at 30, one section a night for 3 months, and the train part wrecked me for a week.
That librarian was doing you a real favor and you just couldn't hear it yet. Same thing happened to me with Crime and Punishment in my early twenties, read it in like five days because I wanted to say I read it, and all I got was tired eyes and a vague sense of the plot. Came back to it years later and actually sat with it, maybe twenty pages a night, and the stuff that flew right past me the first time hit like a truck. There is something about going slow that lets a book get under your skin instead of just scrolling through your brain. Eight days for Anna Karenina is basically speed running a story that was built to simmer. The train part only works if you earned the dread getting there, you know. Good on you for giving it another shot and letting it actually land.