I wouldn’t say it’s a slog at all, it’s just that there are nine or eleven or who knows how many different (important) things happening all at once and it does take some time to absorb the various plot lines and to organize them mentally. It certainly did for me, anyway.
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It’s really good, it just takes forever to read.
If you don’t want to make the effort, read Notes From Underground and The Master and Margarita and drink lots of vodka.
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Haven’t read W&P in many years, but I will 2nd the recommendation of the BBC miniseries. It was surprisingly good.
Sorry, but this is really bad advice. Dostoevsky & Tolstoy had vastly different worldviews and should not be seen as alternatives to each other. Dostoevsky & Solzhenitsyn are much closer, and A-14 is very deliberate in its echoing and challenging of W&AP, which is why I recommended that.
That said, Notes is one of my favorites by Dostoevsky, though it does fall well short of Crime & Punishment. I recently re-read Brothers K, too, and that one is growing on me.
FYI, if anyone is looking to get War and Peace, I picked up a Kindle edition of it for $0.99 last night.
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The problem with a Kindle is you don’t get to schlep around a 1,000-page book. You can’t really appreciate the accomplishment the same way.
Save a buck here: The Project Gutenberg eBook of War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
Or even better, here: Voina i mir : Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Isn’t the usual rap on war and peace that the first half is incredible, and the last half falls into incomprehensible philosophizing? If it’s not it should be.
I learned how law firms work from Moby Dick.
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Yeah, but at least the extra data makes your phone a little heavier.
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That’s why I have to keep my phone under 256 GB. Those 500 GB jobs hurt my back.
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There was a bookstore on The Simpsons that sold Michener at $1.99/pound.
It’s more like the final 16th of the book, and it isn’t incomprehensible.
Thanks. Oddly enough I already own it.
The cast for this 2016 BBC adaptation of War & Peace is incredible. I need to check it out asap.
I was under the impression that you own a bookstore.
Also true. A very small one. So small we’d be unlikely to stock either Life and Fate or War and Peace–owing to limited shelf space.
That’s a good point they’re both pretty wide.
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At least they’re not as big as The Inevitable You-Know-Who Thread Thread and its offspring.
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I sure hope Robert Plant’s not a big Pynchon fan.
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Cheap at twice the price. Any of his books are a good “first book” read, and the second one scratches the same itch. By #3 or 4 that itch begins to bleed profusely.
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