Maxim

Cake looks yummy.

I am truly thankful that they decided to recast him, especially now that I understand who he is. I commend the show.

Never missed him even for a second. Quite honestly... don't ever remember him.

The way they do the product placement, rough and without much thought... is how they plot the entire show basically. If they just learn how to do it in a funnier... or more elegant way... it's going to be way less absurd.

100 pages in. HARDCORE stuff. I'll need my Anna Karenina copy to arrive sooooner... just to be able to recover from Karl Ove's book. NOT THAT I don't love it... It's 10/10 so far.

Then we'll be reading the same version soon! ☺️ So excited that it will be your first meeting with Anna Karenina. So much of modern drama steals left and right from this masterpiece... and it's almost IN EVERYTHING at this point. But for a soap opera fan... woooow... it's just the type of thing we love. Think - adultery, scandal, love, lies and twists... absolute 100 percent soap opera. It's not hard to read at all, like I've heard people say. It flows like a fairytale for me. P.S. I would also love to hear more about that BTS stuff. Sounds interesting.

Oh, no problem. Quite the contrary. I liked to read that she beat Viki in something. I'll look forward to that, haha.

Couldn’t agree more! This is totally how I feel. I think the show’s main problem, aside from living from reveal to reveal and flatlining in between and the dialogue, are the villains. Someone clearly doesn’t know how to write a complex villain. I’m not quick to point fingers at MVJ, since she’s not the only one involved. But honestly, the villains are super cartoonish. And this is coming from Hayley's number 1 fan. I don’t feel any real threat from Dana or the widow. I don't feel threat from any of the bad guys in the show. And when everything is so over the top all the time... you just don’t get that suspense you’d feel if these troublemakers had more depth and dimension. I almost wish the show had an Iris Cory type of character (yes, I'm a bit inspired by the newest 1979 clip leak in the AW topic) - a clever schemer who isn’t so obvious to everyone all the time. Everything in BTG is WAY too obvious and no, these twists every now and then... don’t change a thing. A twist doesn’t fix months of mediocre writing. I believe that if you need a twist to save your ass all the time, then something is amiss. Still, I continue to enjoy the show a lot, while I also hope things get better. It’s not the quality I dreamed of, but it’s not as terrible as it could’ve been. Sorry if this sounds cynical.

Oh, yes... that's it. Damn, I wanted her to be something more than this. Thanks @janea4old for that info.

OMG... If you haven't... then you ABSOLUTELY NEED TO BUY it for Christmas! Buy it for yourself and you won't regret it. I can help with choosing translation. I think that's the most important part, because a translation can make or break a book. I've done TOO much research into it the last few days... haha. I recommend either the Magarshack translation (Signet Classics edition - black background with the approaching train)... or the Bartlett translation (Oxford World Classics edition) and finally - the newest (from 2014) Marian Schwartz one (The Margellos World Republic of Letters edition).... it is amazing (the negative is that it's slower and harder to read, the sentences don't flow as well, but that can also be a positive depending what a person wants from a book) - still I think it's the closest to Tolstoy of all of them. My husband read it to me in Russian and we compared translations together. The Schwartz translation is quite expensive even though the kindle or the eBook may be cheap. P.S. Just checked the kindle version is 0.00 for that one and trust me... it's sublime. So if you want to read it and feel the melodrama and the language to flow easy and not even feel like a translation - Magarshack no doubt about it, but if you want something as close as possible to Tolstoy, but a bit harder to read - Bartlett or Schwartz (both are the newest translations and they have the advantage of being based on the fullest Tolstoy text, the earlier editions have some missing sentences or parts). The Bartlett translation has a very beautiful hardcover and it's very easy to find online. This is just my opinion, but the most popular Pavear and Volokhonsky translation... is just not as good. I read the first 50 pages and it's just so much worse compared to the other ones. But whatever edition you decide, it's still going to be okay, I think. Let me know if you start reading it! I'm still waiting for my Signet edition to arrive, and it will be sometime before Christmas. OLTL has gotten me a bit obsessed with Anna Karenina right now. 😄 This soap just makes people want to read books and that's amazing.