I liked the behind-the-scenes look at academics, English department, and the premise that no one wants to read about "the happily ever after", but I felt that I could not relate to the main character's fear of commitment and marriage. Also, I felt that she and her fiance were very dissimilar and that is why she was so fearful of marrying him. Could have been better if I had liked the main characters more!

I very much liked this book. It's one of those books that make you feel smarter for reading it and also makes you realize how much you don't know! The rarefied atmosphere of university life with its all its pettiness and brilliance is as much a part of the story as the love story. The main character's obsessiveness and angst about happiness and love and women's choices and her quest for tenure are somewhat tiresomely intense, but I have known a few women like this. Some of the writing is so good and there were times I wanted to just stop, ponder, and admire. There are some phrases and insights that I wish I had taken the time to record or bookmark. Guess I'll just have to read it again.

From the opening pages: "For people who claim to want happiness, we Americans spend a lot of time spinning yarns about its opposite. Even the optimistic novels end the minute the good times get rolling... Let me be clear: some of my best friends are tragic novels. But someone's got to call it like it is: Why the taboo? What's so unspeakable about happiness?"

Tolstoy Lied was impressively honest. Rachel Kadish brilliantly pulls out the American obsession of unhappiness/ tragedy/ injustice/ wavering state of mankind- and she pokes fun at it, dissects it and reveals its reasons. Through her main character, Tracy, I discovered why I love love and also why it hurts so much, even when I'm "happy." No matter what I do, I will always be sacrificing something in order to keep something else. There is never a PERFECT solution to anything. However, with love, when considered cautiously and carefully, it is totally worth all of the extra crap that comes along with it.

I was highly impressed, also, with Kadish's use of vocabulary and intellectual conversations between the characters. I love being smart, and I was not let down while reading the thoughts of each of the characters.

Brilliantly written and very inspirational. If you're a love of books like I am, or even like Tracy is, then you will love this story too.

In "Anna Karenina," Leo Tolstoy opens with the statement, "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

"Nonsense!" replies Rachel Kadish's protagonist, a 33-year old assistant professor of English.

"Oh yeah?" says the rest of the novel. "I'll show you! Sort of."

There is a lot to like about this book, which aggressively champions happiness and love, albeit through the words of a woman who declares (at 33, mind you) that she's given up on romance. Unsurprisingly, she then meets a man whom she considers to be not her type with whom she proceeds to fall in love. The book adheres to the standard, get-em-together, tear-em-apart, kiss-and-make-up at the end plot, but the relationship between Tracy and George is really quite stunningly well-rendered, witty, and a great deal of fun.

And the book as a whole is laugh-aloud funny. Kadish wreaks merry hell with academia and theatre with hilarious results. However, the book skews hip-young-New-Yorker, and those that are not hip, young, New Yorkers are pretty much reduced to the stumbling blocks that annoy and/or hinder Tracy and make George act like a twit. And possibly as a nod to the maligned Tolstoy of the title, not everything goes Tracy's way outside of the romance. Personally, I didn't care for that aspect of the book. If an author is going to stake out happiness as a means of narrative rebellion against capital-L Literature, it feels rather cowardly to deal the heroine such an inexplicable blow. But ultimately, the relationship between Tracy and George was enough to sustain my enthusiasm, with an ending that's not "and they lived happily ever after," though really, there's no reason why they shouldn't.

I almost didn’t finished this book. The first third was wonderful and funny and intense.

This academic, tenure-focused woman is the perfect character to use to describe the darkly comic aspects of academe. I know this portrayal to be true. Also true in PHD level literature is that dissertations have become more and More about less and less, forcing one to focus great importance on minutiae.

Halfway through the book, our main character displays this same kind of thinking to a budding romance. Well, at that point, I got so exasperated with her inability to see any big picture and her necessity to name and catalog every action and emotion, that I got disgusted.

Read on...don’t give up. As her world begins to collapse she is forced to deal with instinct and is better off for it.

But their is no perfect ending. No control or unbreakable rules for life or love or career or choices.

She doesn’t change who she is and is still mightily flawed but she begins to understand how that is true of everyone and everything.

This book is good for thought and dances in my head. From feminism to career planning to love to friendship to achievement to history and more.

A very good read.

For those who are slightly disenchanted with Disney's happy-ending culture, but remain uncomfortable with all-out cynicism. . .
Kadish's thesis, that contrary to Tolstoy's famous opener in Anna Karenina, NOT all happy people are happy in the same way, is played out in an unexpected fashion as the book progresses. This is an intelligent novel, with literary allusions that are enjoyable, but not too heavy for a casual read. It is insightful and thought-provoking without being heavy handed or overly dense. An excellently executed work, well worth reading.

A beautifully written love story. I'm surprised it's not more well-known (although perhaps a little too much academia for some).

I loved the basic argument about whether only stories with sad endings could be considered good literature. This has long been something which I felt was a limiting parameter in how we evaluate what is considered quality writing. This is well written, nicely paced mystery and love story. One of my favorites.

And I thought I couldn't love a book and its writer more than I did after reading "The Weight of Ink"!

Rachel Kadish is a supremely gifted, insightful, literate writer. Her book "Tolstoy Lied" is a gift to readers who are not afraid to grow in understanding of themselves and others. Its pages are overflowing with honesty and insight, not as a guide but as a journey to the experience of the richness and complexity of being human.

"Tolstoy Lied" is for anyone who tries to make sense out of love and other people's actions. It is for anyone who has analyzed their life and relationships looking for answers and understanding. You're not alone in your quest. Join Kadish on hers and celebrate whatever causes and conditions arose to bring her great gifts into your life.

This really didn't work for me. Was I supposed to like the love interest? The main character's friends? Colleagues? Family? Grad student? Because I didn't.

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So said Tolstoy. Tracy Farber is going to prove him wrong. Just as soon as she gets tenure. Or maybe getting married will get in the way. Severe interdepartmental strife in her Manhattan university's English department may get in the way of all of these plans.

In the end, "Peple misunderstand happiness. They think it's the absence of trouble. That's not happiness, that's luck. Happiness is the ability to live well alongside trouble. No two people have the same trouble, or the same way of metabolizing it. Q.E.D.: No two happy people are happy in the same way. Even Tolstoy was afraid to admit this, and I don't blame him. Every day brilliant people, people smarter than I, wallow in safe tragedy and pessimism, shying from what really takes guts: recognizing how much courage and labor happiness demands."

Rachel Kadish is an amazing writer. I am definitely searching out her short fiction and her earlier novel, "From a Sealed Room" even though I don't know they could measure up to this compelling book.

The starting point of this story is the famous Tolstoy quote: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” As the intro says, literature professor Tracy Farber disagrees with this quote, which seems to imply that only unhappiness is interesting. Happiness is boring and predictable.

This controversy is presented to us as both the theme of this book, and also a project within the book, a project which Tracy never quite gets around to beginning until the end of the story. I believe in her project and I agree with her: I think literature (and music and poetry, for that matter) does indeed have a prejudice against happiness, especially happy marriages and families.

But I'm not sure this book is going to drive the coffin nail into Tolstoy's maxim. Yes, I found it a very interesting story, but it was the conflict and the unhappiness (actual and threatened) that was interesting. When the happiness came back in all its glory, it was within only a few dozen pages of the end of the book.

Still, I loved the book. I enjoyed the honesty of the love story. These are real people making the mistakes that real people make, and yet living to tell the tale. I loved the quality of the writing; Rachel Kadish is highly literate and I enjoy reading a book written by someone who knows how to write excellent English sentences and paragraphs. I found the characters believable and credible. I found it hard to put this book down. I've read Kadish's more recent work, 'The Weight of Ink', which is also excellent, and look forward to more great stories from her in the years to come.