No argument with what you're saying, but on a personal level I can't stand Anna, the character. Reminds me too much of a rather unfortunate ex, and ruins the story for me.

To me, Anna Karenina is more about Levin than anyone else since Levin is basically a fictional version of Tolstoy.

Anna Karenina is the novel I probably read the most of without finishing. After a while, it became hard to care about rich people and their affairs and varied "nervous conditions".

Only what was then "the affairs and nervous conditions" of rich people --and the rest were working wretches--, nowadays (and for the better part of last century) has been extended to the middle class, that is, to everybody.

I frequently find myself thinking the Greatest Novel Ever Written is either War and Peace or Anna Karenina, depending on which one I re-read most recently.

To me, Anna Karenina is really mostly notable for having the second-greatest opening line in all literature.

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way", to save others a google.

The greatest one being, of course:

"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times."

It is a truth universally acknowledged... Jane Austen, naturally.

What's the first?

And the greatest?

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

Kafka. "One day, Gregor Samsa awoke to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach."

And teens today (or soon) would not visually know what "television tuned to a dead channel" meant...

It's almost more profound in some ways - on a lot of modern TVs, a dead channel is displayed as being a solid field of bright blue. So, it changes the way Sprawl's sky appears to each reader, but it makes the change take place in Case's head. If it's bright blue, and a person recognizes that first as related to a TV, what does that say about the way they perceive the world? Especially with how bad Case wants digital access.

"Call me Ishmael"?

Now, Everybody---

It's hard to pinpoint a "best," but I agree that this one (from Gravity's Rainbow) it quite, quite good, one I recall often.

¿En un lugar de la Mancha...?