War and Peace

I bought the book years ago.  I think it was right when I graduated from college and thought of myself as an intellectual.  I was going to finally read books of my choosing and they were going to be the great classics!  Ha!  Ya.  It's been sitting on my shelf for years collecting dust.  When I saw that the last category for the Classics Challenge was A Russian Classic, I knew which book I needed to read.  I started War and Peace in February, but unfortunately, I was already reading another rather long book at the time:

I decided to focus on the book I was already reading and just read 5 or 10 pages here and there of War and Peace.  PS- The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt also happens to be an absolutely fascinating book if you like biographies.  It stands out as one of my favorites.  Anyway, since I started out just reading a few pages at a time, I got into the habit of reading it that way, so I continued on in that fashion long after I finished the other book.  On this past Sunday, I realized I only had about 100 pages left, so I decided to just sit down and get 'er done!  I didn't realize that the last 50 pages had nothing to do with the actual novel plot.  They're Tolstoy's philosophical ramblings on how history should be recorded.  I powered through those pages.

I've given myself a day to just be happy about the fact that I can finally check this book of my bucket list, but I have to say that I enjoyed the book a lot more than I thought I would.  I was prepared to appreciate it for its literary value, but I found that I actually really liked the book.  The sheer volume of characters in this book (over 500) made it a bit tricky to navigate at the beginning, but I started to really become interested in the development of some of the characters even if I didn't always necessarily "like" them.  For example, Pierre irritated me for at least the first half of the book.  He just couldn't seem to get his act together, and was always doing ridiculous things, but then all of a sudden he grew on me and I genuinely wanted to know what was going to happen to him.

I was surprised by Tolstoy's sharp tongue.  He really had a few choice things to say about military historians.  The detailed military minutia was not my favorite, but I did really like learning more about the Napoleonic War and the invasion of Russia by the French.

It's definitely not a novel for the faint of heart, but War and Peace deserves its title as a masterful classic.