Boring, confusing and impossible to engage with...mostly I wanted to slap some sense into all these ladies and beg them to do no more book club meetings...for something that starts with such high purposes and claiming to be different, it turns into a mismach of bad literary discussions thinly disguising the gossiping and the attempts at uncovering the dark secret one of them hides....blergh that's all.

I was warned that this wasn't the best book in the world and that was an understatement. This is the WORST book I read in 2009. It was so repetitive, a boring plot, 2D characters, etc. etc. etc. Wow – it was bad. It was so bad that I had to read it completely to fully appreciate it's true crapiness. I try to avoid reading reviews and even the back covers of books, but this book was so unbelievably terrible that about halfway through, I took a good look at the cover in case I was missing somethin...

I didn’t read Jane Austen’s Book Club, I only watched the movie. Perhaps I wouldn’t have liked that book either, but that movie inspired me to read this book, which I definitely didn’t like. I found it pretentious and self-serving that the characters were constantly guilt-ridden about their curiosity of their friends’ marriage, became more important that the stories of their lives, that they had to state over and over again how much they loved literature and how because they wanted to discuss it...

I love reading books about books and this one was quite good. Six friends get together for regular book club meetings and throughout the year make changes to their own lives based on their reactions to the books they've read and their reactions to what's going on in each other's lives. I thought the author did a really good job creating the book discussions. The book club had read the biographies of the authors as well as their major literary works and each character had a fresh and unique persp...

I should have known better than to pick this one up, but at least now I can warn the rest of you. This book barely has a plot, the characters are flat and two-dimensional, and their secrets, when revealed, turn out to be not all that interesting after all. Even if reading a book about women using a book club as an excuse to talk about their troubles with relationships, children, etc., is your cup of tea, you can do better. If it's not, Dinner with Anna Karenina won't win you over. Stay away.

Can I give it nothing? It was so horrible, I did something that I loathe. I skipped/skimmed pages to the end to see if the question they are asking through out the entire book is ever answered. It's my book pet peeve, where they constantly ask the same question and never answer it in a book, and never just come out and ask the person what they are thinking. Sorry, what a waste of time.

A novel featuring books and book clubs, Dinner with Anna Karenina follows the lives of six women throughout the course of a year as they work their way through literary classics as well as a host of personal problems. Rather than focus on a central character or couple, the novel encompasses the professional and personal lives of each of the six ladies—Trish, Donna, Rita, Cynthia, Jen, and Elizabeth—while chronicling their bimonthly book club dinners and progressively deepening friendships. It is...

I enjoyed this book. Some reviewed it as slow and wordy. It was pretty predictable, but I was interested in the characters, and I don't mind slower stories, so I liked it. I also have read The Jane Austen Book Club and The Friday Night Knitting Club, which are slightly similar to this book. I found that toward the end of this book there is meaning, and it contains some honest/frank examples of friendships between women.

a literary groundhog day...what might have been a good story at 100 pages was brutally dragged into 360. for all the talk of insightful literary critique, the author gives her own readers no credit to pick up on even the most blatent concepts.

Expected something more literary. This was really just chick lit that mentioned literary fiction.

An interesting premise. Detours over duplicative territory; this really needed a good editor.

This book was so dull! So very, very dull. It was repetitive and in my opinion pretentiously written. Yes, I chose keep reading it thinking something was going to happen. No. Not really. Yes, I could have put this book down and walked away. The description was very enticing to me and I just knew it would pick up and have something interesting or big somewhere soon for goodness sake something HAD to happen. What really bothered me the most about this snoreville of a read was that there was this b...

Though this book hasn't received the greatest reviews, I actually really liked it. I was drawn into the story and I felt that the characters were pretty relatable. The novel centers around a book club made up of six accomplished, brilliant women - a psychiatrist, nutritionist, graphic designer/artist, marketing director, school guidance counselor, and a PhD student - all with different personalities, upbringings, dreams, and life challenges. They discuss wonderful literature, mostly classics, su...

I am puzzled by the angry one star reviews. Dinner with Anna Karenina was a fine story about six female friends who meet once a month in their own private book club. All six are accomplished women in their own rights and all six women also have problems with their spousal (or lack there of) relationships. These issues manage to be mirrored in the book selections and so their stories build. Yes, the characters were fairly two dimensional and the ending was too neatly wrapped up, but so what? It w...

At the first book club meeting of the year, one book club member reveals that she and her husband have separated. The other members are stunned and spend the rest of the year trying to figure out why. Lots of gossip and speculation, but also lots of thoughts about marriage/relationships and what make them work or not work based on the book club members' experiences and the books they read. This book club approaches a discussion seriously in both reading and research and food preparation, but it

I could not finish this book. The character names in the text didn't even match the summary on the back of the book jacket. It was a mess. I think I made it to chapter three. In summary: Women who don't really even seem to like each other have a book club. They are all different. They all like books. I couldn't care about any of them. Ugh.

I love books about books. And I find book clubs fascinating, this was a good read with information about the book authors and certainly the lives of the book club members. Some day I will read; Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Lottery, The Bell Jar, and Little Women. I found the lives of the author's as interesting as their books

did not love the book. parts of it were enjoyable, but overall not a great read

Sorry....couldn't even finish the book.....too confusing and stupid....

I loved it.  I really enjoyed this one about six women who are friends bonded together with their love of books and  formed a book club.I found myself absorbed in every chapter, and each book discussion, as if I was right there with them.  I loved how they discussed their books and I couldn't get through each chapter fast enough to learn what the next book was going to be read and discussed.  Fortunately for me, each book selected was one that I had already read and it was so interesting to me t...

Six very different women in New York City, all lovers of literature, have formed a monthly book club that has been meeting for several years. At a September meeting after a summer break, Cynthia announces that she is divorcing her husband – that she put him out of the house the night before because she had found out something about him – but she won’t define the problem. As they go through their year of meetings, each woman confronts her own shortcomings and the group learns not only from the bo...

I like books about women. I like books about books. So it would stand to reason that I liked this novel about a group of fictious women and the books they discussed. And I did...mostly.I liked the wide diversity within the book club. I liked that books were the thread binding these women together as friends. I liked the author's description of the women's good attributes mingled among their many faults. It made the characters real. Finally, I liked Gloria Goldreich's simple prose. It made immers...

Dinner with Anna Karenina was shelved with other "staff picks" at my public library. So, I decided to let someone else pick my next book and I was not disappointed. I struggled in the beginning to "enjoy" this seemingly mundane literary critique masquerading as a novel. Then I became worried I had stumbled on another book about women, food, horrible husbands, and their books. However, while Dinner with Anna Karenina was all those things, I was draw into the lives of these women. And for me, that...

Overall, I actually enjoyed this book. I love reading books about books, so I found that aspect of the novel pleasing. I will admit however, that due to the dull/long-winded/sections where nothing happened, I took much longer to read this book than my usual novel. I rated this so highly because I feel that the author writes very well. I loved the descriptions and just felt myself drawn in. On a side note, I find it odd that the description provided for this book gives the wrong character names.....

These girls kept their friendships and lives going over classic novels.to see friends pushed away, kept in the dark, share food, keep secrets, and love one another for who they authentically are. I'd say this is what keeps great friendships alive. The author shows each of us not to be lead down the grass is greener road, take the journey, you are not alone. Surprise yourself by making your choices pan out. If you did not care for the actual book Anna Karenina I am not sure you will enjoy this bo...

The title intrigued me right away; I loved Anna Karenina! There was good character development in the first part of the book....and each woman added to the book discussions in a manner indicative of her personality and her insights into each author. The story began to disseminate at about the halfway point and the characters became quite predictable. The author could have been more in-depth in continuing each woman's story and could have added some unexpected twists ( note there was one exceptio...

I was a little nervous about reading this book after I saw the diversity of stars and comments. I neither loved, nor hated this book. I was very interested in it and have added some of the classics these ladies read to my own reading list in order to better know the discussions at hand. I love to read about people who read and have read other book club stories. This one was pretty middle of the road for me. It was a good commute read and kept me interested but I doubt I would highly recommend it...

I really enjoyed this book and so I give it four stars for being very compelling story about something I can really relate to. Sometimes I thought it dragged and the author was a little flowery, but not often and for the most part i really enjoyed the bool. It was a very good story about how friendships and books both enhance who we are and help us grow and change. A nice book and a quick enjoyable read.

I thoroughly enjoyed this read. This is the second book that I read by this author, and I found it to be very enjoyable.The characters in this book have depth and I was able to relate to them easily. The only one thing I would have changed was the amount of time spent gossiping about one of the characters' marriage problems. I would have liked to get more story instead. But other than that, it was enjoyable.

This was among a number of "book club" novels I set out to read at one point and I thought it was one of the more well done. (Disclaimer: Anna Karenina is one of my favorite novels, so perhaps I was sympathetically predisposed to this book). Anyway, I thought it was an interesting take on the transformative effect of books, showing how individual club members really re-examined their lives and priorities as a result of experiencing an Anna Karenina like moment.