During February I plan to start reading War and Peace. It has been on my list a long time, but a college pal spoiled a plot point so I had to wait a few years to forget what he said. b_b says he will read along, anyone else interested? 2666 was a lot of fun.
It's long. More of a good thing, I figure. Among classics, it is about half as long as À la recherche du temps perdu and similar to Les Misérables, and somewhere between the modern titles Infinite Jest and Atlas Shrugged, which people apparently read.
In 2015, I bailed out on Facebook and Instagram and the rest of the socmed sinkholes. (Miss them, sometimes, but have no plans to return.) Last month I realized that without any special effort my total reading for the year jumped from about 3000 pages in 2015 to nearly hitting what used to be my annual goal of 10,000 pages in 2016.
This year I am just over my target of 30 pages per day after reading Grendel, How Not to Be Wrong, and The Annotated Alice in January. Tolstoy should get me through several weeks of commuting before bike weather returns.
I picked up a Kindle edition of the Oxford World's Classics edition, which updates the classic translation by Tolstoy's friends Aylmer and Louise Maude with some maps and many notes. Gutenberg has other digital formats, and Google Play has cheap and free editions.
WuzzO! It's my nightstand book. Tolstoy fills my ears and eyes before I go to bed each night. My god do I never seem to make a dent, though. To wit, I read Anna Karenina the summer of 2014. That was during a seven week stint my AmeriCorps team and I spent holed up in tents while we rehabbed an 11-mile hiking trail. We were in the middle of nowhere south central Illinois, with nothing to do after the work day. The sunsets were late in that part of the summer, so every evening I would spend reading, making a lot of progress on the weekends. It took practically the whole project to finish. And that book is like 2/3 the length of War & Peace. In an essay I read about W&P, an academic with what I imagine is a decent reading speed spent about 12 days reading it. --- I know it's not a competition to read it quickly. Part of the joy is rereading passages or sections where Tolstoy is just on a run. But I'll never finish at my rate. My tentative plan is to spend this spring break at a friend's cabin, reading and relaxing. I have the newest Briggs translation.
The Kindle app gives 33 hours and 28 minutes as the typical time to read. I am not a fast reader, and easily distracted, so this is a long-term project. Last year I got into a groove of reading long fiction in e-book form and nonfiction in solid books that I leave at home. I love the feeling of having a double life, in which I am constantly preoccupied with the troubles and dramas of another, secret world.
One of my favorite novels of all time. I read it in 2001 in China. I had a lot of quiet evenings, and it was a treat. Anna Karenina is very good, but War and Peace transcends. My favorite thing about Tolstoy, is his ability to bring you into the thoughts of distinct people with distinct ideas, and make you empathize with them. I have been waiting to read it again. The second part of the epilogue has largely impacted my historical thinking. That is a must read.
I read Anna but I never loved it. I was so wrapped up in War and Peace, I remember finishing a "War" chapter, being pissed that I was slung back to the Rostovs worrying about who their daughter would marry and by the end of the Rostov chapter being pissed to be slung back into the damn war when I really, really needed to know what was going to happen to that girl.
Ha that is brilliant. I felt the exact same when reading George RR Martin -- the POV characters would switch and I would have to resist the very strong urge to skip right ahead to that character's next chapter.
This one? [War and Peace (Penguin Classics, Deluxe Edition)](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143039997/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_3dwKybE8E3XHE) Edit: also a bugski for my link not working?
I'm reading this translation. I've got 'till the 20th. It's gonna be close. :|
I appreciated the notes provided in the Pevear and Volokhonsky version of The Brothers Karamazov, which provided a lot of insight missing from my barebones Garnett paperback. P&V have attracted some criticism for succeeding more on hype than quality. For a casual reader like me, I am not sure it makes much difference. Is yours a library copy? I wouldn't recommend reading a 1390-page book on mobile, but Project Gutenberg does offer a "read this book online" link.
I'll give this a shot. If you have any follow up posts on it, please tag me. It's been a while sincerely I've read a book of this length but have previously finished Les Miserables and Count of Monte Cristo.
I figure we should at least have material for the quotes thread for the next six months. Monte Cristo worked really well for me in digital form last year. I could take my lightweight Kindle on the metro, read in a browser during lunch hour, and get through another chapter in bed using my phone. The automatic bookmarking (and notes and highlights) works very well across devices for Amazon purchases. My paperback copy was just too bulky to lug around, and it turned out to be an unlabeled abridgment anyway. Hope you enjoy it!
I finished it today. I enjoyed it. The quote that most stuck with me was "Kings are the slaves of history."