I read “Anna Karenina” on the school bus when I was 13. I took it a chapter a ride, shining a flashlight I kept in my backpack over the pages in the winter when the mornings were dark. It was my favorite part of the day — a stolen quiet moment, with just me and Anna and Kitty and Vronsky. I knew pretty much immediately that this would become the best book I would ever read, and even though 13-year-old me was wrong about a lot of things (I wore a lot of vests that year), I was right about this. The book grabbed at my heart in a way few pieces of writing — or anything, for that matter — have since. It made me feel full — like I was about to burst with all the feelings it incited in me. When I finally finished it, huddled under the covers at 3:00 in the morning, I cried for an hour, hugging the book tight to my chest. I woke up the next morning still holding it. I’ve read “Anna Karenina” so many times that I’ve lost track of the number in the six years since that first encounter. It’s like my Bible, and I keep it by my bed for emergencies. The book is high melodrama — a story of infidelity, passion gone wrong, obsession, life, death and suicide. It’s grand enough that the most recent film adaptation placed the whole thing on a stage, putting the theatrics of the story to the foreground. But despite the opulence and drama of it all, Tolstoy’s magnum opus remains the most achingly human story I’ve ever read. The characters are so fragile, so delicately spun to life it’ll break your heart. It took me a couple rereads to be able to see the cracks running between lines of the story proper, but eventually I saw that “Anna Karenina” exists in two dimensions. There’s the famous narrative of adultery and obsession and divorce and twisted love. But then there’s also this complicated web of the characters’ interiorities running in between all of that, filling in those cracks. It’s not till the very end of the book that you realize the two layers are inextricable, how the minutiae of the characters’ thoughts and feelings and interactions stack on top of each other to create such a towering tragedy. In the end, it was her inner world that ruined Anna. She just couldn’t stand the weight of her feelings. An early scene, shortly after Anna and Vronsky first meet: “She felt as though her nerves were strings being strained tighter and tighter on some sort of screwing peg. She felt her eyes opening wider and wider ... something within oppressing her breathing, while all shapes and sounds seemed in the uncertain half light to strike her with unaccustomed vividness.” Or this moment later on that’s not even a scene; it’s really more of an offhand description, but it’s one of my favorite lines of any book I’ve ever read. Kitty is lying in bed after she realizes the scope of her feelings for Levin, and it goes like this: “‘It’s late, it’s late,’ she whispered with a smile. A long while she lay, not moving, with open eyes, whose brilliance she almost fancied she could herself see in the darkness.” I feel so holy about this. Sometimes when I read these moments in “Anna Karenina” I feel like I’m intruding, like it’s too intimate being privy to these intricacies of the characters’ most private thoughts. It’s hard to explain why my heart tightens whenever I read these moments, except maybe to say that it feels like a mirror being held up to the inside of my own brain. It’s just true, in a way that goes beyond relatability, but down to the bone marrow of what it feels like to be a person, to be this specific type of person. Because it’s just not that I relate to Kitty. I’ve been Kitty, young and vulnerable and lying in the dark with my heart racing, feeling my eyes shining so bright I could imagine them brilliant enough to light up the room. I’ve been Anna feeling my nerves tighten with every passing breath, like the colors around me are too bright, like my body is a live wire being wound up. Those moments woven throughout the story are what make “Anna Karenina” the book that taught me I have a whole internal world, secret and entirely separate from anybody else’s expectations or opinions of me. I’m so grateful I found it when I was 13, a time when every day contained what felt like a million punches in the gut. I spent — and still spend, as I think every young woman does — too much time paring down the jagged edges of my personality, my body, my whole self. It’s what so many girls do. Hate ourselves and hurt ourselves and hack ourselves into neat pieces that can fit into the tiny boxes built for us to live in, until we can’t take it anymore. A lot of girls survive it but some, like Anna, don’t. “Anna Karenina” gave me the language to articulate the moments — so rare and tenuous that noticing them is like pinning a butterfly’s wings — when I can feel the full capacity of all the secrets I carry, all the things I want to do and feel and be. Kitty felt it lying awake in her room, fully aware of herself and her shining eyes. Lorde sings about it in “Writer in the Dark”: “And in my darkest hour / I stumbled on a secret power.” Fiona Apple, in “Every Single Night”: “I just wanna feel everything / So I’m gonna try to be still now.” Kesha, in “Rainbow”: “Now I can see the magic inside of me.” And Virginia Woolf, in “The Waves”: “I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me.” The shining eyes, the power, the magic, the capacities — they’re all just different names for that same flash of understanding, that moment of vivid awareness when you can see yourself clearly for the first time in forever. Anna wonders, as she feels herself unraveling in real time, “Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?” By Frank Virzi ©2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLC 10/17/18 Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis 10/17/18 ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE: Release Date: Wednesday, October 17, 2018 ACROSS 1 Recurring theme 6 Contemporary of Dashiell 10 Apple debut of 1998 14 Childish retort 15 Group of two 16 Santa __: Sonoma County seat 17 2005 reality show featuring Whitney Houston 20 War on Poverty org. 21 “In that event ... ” 22 Kipling python 23 ’60s sitcom portrayer of Cathy Lane and her “identical cousin” 27 Spin, as a baton 29 “The Simpsons” storekeeper 30 Leb. neighbor 31 Looks up to 33 Show of rural respect 35 Army NCO 37 Little piggy 38 Ginger-ale- and-grenadine “cocktail” 43 1988 noir remake 44 Ewe, say 45 Website with business reviews 47 Supple 51 Many a microbrew 53 One in the middle of Knoxville? 54 FDR and JFK 55 Chinese menu standard 58 Announcer Hall 59 Protein-rich food 61 Wish undone 62 Where social graces are taught, and what 17-, 23-, 38-, and 55-Across each has 68 McFlurry cookie 69 Start of a hymn 70 Creeps-inducing 71 Arms of a starfish 72 Over and above: Abbr. 73 Silvery little fish DOWN 1 Will Smith sci-fi series 2 Laudatory piece 3 French pronoun 4 “You’re lying!” in a playground 5 “Old” old- fashioned sorts 6 Old name for Tokyo 7 Cube creator 8 Bio class cost 9 Slow Churned ice cream brand 10 Like the vb. “be” 11 Red Sox star Betts 12 Like angry bees 13 Lock sites 18 Pro wrestling throw 19 Deepest level 23 Shell out 24 Jungle swingers 25 Rear 26 Impulse 28 Tearful 32 Team with the most Super Bowl victories 34 Central spot 36 TV host Pennington and Hall of Famer Cobb 39 Places to perch 40 Bangkok native 41 Big name in denim 42 Power co. product 46 Peruvian capital? 47 Commit perjury to protect 48 Former Indian prime minister Gandhi 49 “Dog Day Afternoon” director Lumet 50 Crude model used for public ridicule 52 Elicits 56 Long sentence 57 Turn a midi into a mini, say 60 Cries of discovery 63 Platform for Siri 64 Mdse. 65 Malachite, e.g. 66 Many a Monet 67 Permit Imagine the hottest, most humid day of the summer. One of those days where the air feels like jelly, and it’s easy to sit in front of the A / C unit for hours, watching the air blow in and out. You’re sitting on the porch of a cottage near some body of water, listening to the cicadas buzz loudly through the evening’s soft glow. A radio is playing inside the house, faintly muted Americana flowing through the open screen door that’s torn in a few places. You take a sip of beer, lean back in your rocking chair and fade into the night, staring off at nothing in particular, comforted and happy. This is what it’s like to listen to Kurt Vile’s new record Bottle It In: an aimlessly successful collection of psychedelic folk that captures the happiness of uncertainty in amber, sunlight shining through even its darkest moments. From the beginning of his career, Vile has truly proven himself to be the king of good vibes, consistently pushing out mellow jams that give listeners a glimpse into his rambling mind. Between his skill for fingerpicking, hazy psychedelia and his country drawl, the songwriter’s penchant for creating mood is unmatched on Bottle It In, a record that is as meaningful as it is irresolute. Kurt Vile’s seventh solo album is patchworked together, yet that’s its greatest asset. At face value, Bottle It In seems haphazard — each song follows its own twisting path through Vile’s psyche, stumbling upon nuggets of wisdom and funny quips alike in an endless daze. The warm ambiance of Vile’s music is present in all of his albums, but here he has achieved a perfect balance: His untethered consciousness is both amplified and grounded by expansive arrangements of guitar and harp. “I was on the ground but looking straight into the sun / But the sun went down and I couldn’t find another one / For a while,” he sings on album highlight “Bassackwards,” a tangential thought that freezes one summer moment in time. The virtue of Vile’s music is in his stream of consciousness, one that can go from “Oh girl, you gave me rabies / And I don’t mean maybe” in “Hysteria” to the “Don’t tell them / That you love them / For your own sake” of title track “Bottle It In” and make the two lines just as heartfelt. Though Bottle It In may cover love, friendship, loneliness and everything in between, the tie between every song is Vile’s honesty with himself and his audience. The singer is unabashedly on-brand in sound and subject matter throughout the record, and it works for him — the ephemeral quality of his ambient guitar and off-hand lyrics veer from bright to solemn quickly, but everything rests on a foundation of truth. It can often be said that the first three minutes of a Kurt Vile song will tell you enough about it to stop paying attention. For those who only appreciate his music for its chill nature and sweet guitar riffs, this is easy to accept, to turn it on and zone out. Of course, this is part of Vile’s allure — but beneath the reverb and soft percussion is a poignant message of accepting life as it comes. To him, life is “just like a song if the repeats were long” (“One Trick Ponies”), and he has a point. Everyone is floating through the years just like Vile moves from one atmospheric jam to the next trying to find his own sun, watching it fade into the horizon and waiting for the dawn to come back again. On ‘Bottle It In,’ Kurt Vile is the king of good vibes CLARA SCOTT Daily Arts Writer Bottle It In Kurt Vile Matador Records BOOKS THAT BUILT US ‘Anna Karenina’ & finding my secret internal world ASIF BECHER Daily Books Editor ‘Anna Karenina’ gave me the language to articulate the moments when I can feel the full capacity of all the secrets I carry, all the things I want to do and feel and be If I could answer her, I’d probably say no — you barely understand what those moments mean most of the time, let alone find a way to talk about them. Unless you can write like Tolstoy, you probably won’t be able to find the words. Instead they usually become a delicious secret, a quiet covenant you make within yourself that forms the core of your identity. It’s a part of your world that can never be damaged or tarnished, though it can be buried deep inside. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe some things are worth hiding. Every now and then, though, something finds its way through the layers, into those innermost parts of you. When I was 13, this book worked its way in, and I’ve held it tight ever since. It’s a part of me now. I keep it as close as my deepest secrets. ALBUM REVIEW MATADOR RECORDS The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com Arts Wednesday, October 17, 2018 — 5A