Anna Karenina

I seem to remember an old joke that it wasn't so much about marital infidelity as about agronomy.   Turns out, after 30 CDs --something like 34 hours spread over December and January --it's not so much of a joke after all.  Russia liberated the serfs at roughly the same time as Lincoln ended slavery in the US.  I read a lot about sharecropping from the sharecropper's point of view, but I never read about an owner trying to come up with an agricultural system that would be productive, profitable, AND fair.