Egads, it’s taken me a long time to get around to writing this review. So long that I am over 600 pages into the paperback of The Stand already! Having a baby hasn’t cut into my reading time much but it sure seems to have cut into my review writing.
I started reading War and Peace five years ago when Hubby was moving in with me. It was the last weekend he had the lease on his apartment. His brother was already moved out but Hubby still had a lot left to pack up. (We’re not very good at doing things around here. In fact, some of that stuff is still packed.) He insisted that he didn’t need my help packing, only loading and unloading the truck, and I settled down with his copy of the book as a way to kill time. When the moving was done, I downloaded the free version on my Kindle and said I’d read it someday probably. One thing was for sure, the Kindle version would be easier to hold and would have bigger print.
Fast forward to earlier this year. I’ve been working my way through my ebooks by reading on my Kindle at night. I’ve decided to start with the last book in my library and work my way forward. That book is War and Peace and it suddenly seems to be the perfect time for it. People keep telling me how little time I’ll have to read after having the baby and I am feeling ripe for spiteful reading. I start it and I plug on.
Never in a thousand years did I expect to actually like the book. I mean, really like it. Almost love it. Now, before I dove into this whole thing I did some research online. I looked at a lot of blogs about reading War and Peace first and I saw all kinds of suggestions, the most frequent being to skip the parts you find boring. The second most frequent tip seemed to be to keep a list of characters so as not to get confused. Then I looked for some good chapter by chapter summaries because I was afraid that I would lose track of what was going on with all of these different characters.
When I started reading, I had a hard time figuring out what was happening and who was who. BUT I seemed to think that I needed to know a lot of information going into this book and I found that I was getting frustrated with myself for not knowing who so-and-so was and how they related to such-and-such. I was on the first chapter and felt like I should know everything about everything. I had to tell myself some very important things.
- Trust Tolstoy. It’s true that there are a lot of characters and I felt lost in the plot before there even was a plot to get lost in. I had to remind myself repeatedly that Tolstoy was going to tell me everything that I needed to know. And, you know what? He did.
- Sit back and enjoy the ride. This is not like The Age of Innocence, a book that packed a lot of punch at the end, and I seemed to get that from the start. Also, it is a BIG book and it was going to take me a while to get through it. When I caught myself rushing to finish, even though I was only 10% in, I forced myself to slow down and just enjoy the story.
As a woman who loves books and has an English degree and is a librarian, there are a lot of books that I haven’t read that I have a basic idea about. War and Peace was not one of them. Going into it, I had no idea what it was about. War and peace, maybe? Do you know what it’s about? It’s about life. It’s about the mistakes people make and their day to day worlds and the way their paths criss-cross over time and it’s about pride and it’s about, yes, war and peace.
Tolstoy managed to create so many characters that I loved. I found myself switching favorites constantly. I even liked the ones who were not meant to be liked. I got caught up in their stories enough to exclaim things aloud to Hubby, who thinks I’m crazy.
So, totally worth the read. I’m glad I did it.
I is Who I Is 