War and Peace, Tolstoy (original 1868; edition 1985)

It would need more than courage to start this one.

Exhaustive account of five Russian families during the Napoleonic and French Wars. Never boring, but hard to absorb at times. Once I got used to the Russian names (and nicknames) it wasn't too bad of an expereince. A lot of details, but intriuging all the way. Not as memorable for it's story as it is for it's massiveness. Finally read it for bragging rights more than interest (even though it was on my TBR forever). ( )

Read this book as a teen and I remember I really loved it. Wanna read again, this tiem in English. (The first copy was translated in Dutch) ( )

War and Peace was one of those books I always intended to get round to, someday, when I had more time. Since I'm unlikely to find myself with more free time than I have now in the future, it's probably for the best that my dad dared me to read the whole book -- he was quite specific about this -- including the epilogue. The whole epilogue. In translation, obviously, although he did jokingly suggest I learn Russian first and try it then.

I have to say, I loved it. The quote on the spine of my edition is: "It's a book that you don't just read, you live." And to some extent, that's true. I started out reading it intending to read one hundred pages a day -- a pretty easy goal for me, and one I thought I could keep up, even if I found the book boring. Then one day I had quite a bit of free time and... I read three hundred pages in a single day. And after that, the book was virtually never out of my hand, unless I needed both hands to eat dinner or play a video game (or, to be realistic, type -- I live and die a ten fingered typist). It went everywhere with me.

The characters in this book came to life in my head. I loved the Rostovs, aww'd at Pierre, and adored Andrei. I didn't think I'd like the old Prince Bolkonsky, but I ended up loving him too. The characters are written so well. There's so many of them, yet they all stick in my head. Every single one of them had some life, even if they whirled in and out of the story and had only a handful of chapters they even appeared in. Obviously, I'm no judge of the accuracy of the translation, but I liked the way it was written.

The thing I didn't get on so well with was the philosophising about war. I'm not very familiar with the period in history discussed, so I had a little trouble following that. The second part of the epilogue struck me as both unnecessary -- the main narrative got all those points across -- and extremely boring. In fact, I sort of wondered how Tolstoy had got a time travel machine and sat in on my Religious Studies A Level, because a lot of the stuff about free will came right out of my syllabus. (I concluded he was probably a soft determinist, in case anyone wanted to know.)

I'm giving it five stars because it sucked me in so much and made me care so much, despite the bits I didn't so much enjoy. ( )

What a master story teller ... and the translation is a delight ( )