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comment by blackbootz
blackbootz  ·  2632 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: War and Peace

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.

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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.





wasoxygen  ·  2631 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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.