welcome to...YEAR AND PEACE.folks. it's with great sadness that i inform you that when you're asked "when did you know you were seeing emma's downfall" you can tell them september 1, 2024.today i begin the project that will surely bring about my mortal end.on this day, elle and i will read one chapter of tolstoy's war and peace, and then we will do that again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and so on and so forth for the following 357 days, shaking our heads to show we disagree wit...

we* did it girls

*we = me and my multiple existential crises

"Who is right and who is wrong? No one! But if you are alive - live: tomorrow you'll die as I might have died an hour ago. And is it worth tormenting oneself, when one has only a moment of life in comparison with eternity?"

This is one of those books that can be life-changing. I read this as a teenager and I remember exactly where I was (sitting on my bed, in my grandmother's house, in southern Germany) when I finished it. I must have spent an hour just staring out the window, in awe of the lives I'd just led, the experiences I'd just had.****I'm now re-reading this, enjoying it immensely and no doubt appreciating it much more than I did the first time. Tolstoy has the most amazing ability to make us feel, when he ...

Before I turned the last page of this massive volume, which had been neglected in my bookshelves for more than six years, War and Peace was a pending task in my mental reading universe knowing it to be one of the greatest Russian or maybe simply one of the greatest novels of all times.Well, in fact, it was something else. I have a selective memory, I don’t know whether it comes as a blessing or as a curse, that enables me to remember the most insignificant details like for instance, where and wh...

So... I did it. I finally convinced myself to read War and Peace, partly because it's just something everyone wants to say they've done, and partly because one always needs a good excuse to procrastinate during the exam period when I should have been studying. And, you know what, I really enjoyed most of it. The novel is far less taxing than I imagined, I don't know if that's because the English translation goes easy on us non-Russians or because Tolstoy wrote it in a quite light-hearted fashion...

In this frightening, isolated time, let me direct you to War and Peace. People resist this book - they do it because it's something of a punch line as a monolithic, difficult novel. But this is one of the frothiest soap operas of a novel that I know of, with far more narrative propulsion than the excellent (but sometimes slow) ANNA KARENINA. Two nations at war - great world leaders and generals, yes, but also trench life, and even more so, relevantly, now, the way war alters lives at home. The t...

When I was growing up, the conventional wisdom was that War and Peace was the sine qua non of difficult books: the scope, the length, OMG the length! Conquering this Everest was The Test of whether you were a Man/Reader. I have now read it. Thump chest and make Tarzan yell. Actually, you know chump, big deal. The mountain really wasn't so large after all. There are love affairs, there is a war, peace eventually returns to the Shire Russia. Sorry, got confused there for a minute with Lord of the ...

So, I know you've all been on edge these past two months, and since I should be studying for the social work licensing exam tonight, it seems like the perfect time to put an end to your suspense.After all my agonizing and the thoughtful suggestions below about whether I should mutilate my gorgeous hardcover Pevear and Volokhonsky translation in the interest of less hazardous subway toting.... Readers, I carried him. All 1272 pages. Every day, across five boroughs and three states, for nearly two...

Whatever else I am, I am the type of person who reads classic novels out of a sense of obligation. Also, I must admit, out of a sense of vanity. My ego, after all, is as fragile as a goldfish and requires the constant attention of a newborn baby. Every once in awhile, it needs a little boost, and the intellectual challenge of Dostoevsky or Dickens can really work wonders. Now, I’ve been told that forcing myself to read books I don’t necessarily like is a fruitless waste of time (and that the rev...