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4.08 AVERAGE
4.08 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
adventurous
emotional
funny
informative
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Any book that makes me laugh and cry gets 5⭐️
Absolutely incredible
Absolutely incredible
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Death of parent, War
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I’m gonna go ahead and pretend the epilogues didn’t exist so I can still give this five stars
'War and Peace' is a five-star epic! The novel alternates between chapters of domestic dramas and chaotic battlefield realities. Carefully planned strategies of warfare, and parental guidance for the matter, fall apart as they inevitably do. Intellectual theories and life philosophies of every character (hundreds of characters, ooooh, although five Russian families are mostly closely followed by author Leo Tolstoy) are examined minutely as each character experiences society dinners and dances, marriage, economic losses and gains, and war from the years 1805 to 1820. These families are either officially registered in the Russian hereditary aristocrat classes or they live on the periphery of the hereditary aristocrats. There are attractive military men and beautiful young wealthy girls and accomplished politicos. Respectable and socially acceptable one and all, of course!
The book manages to encompass almost every personal adventure and intellectual thought ever experienced by most of Mankind at one point or another. The author wrote an uber book! Characters change as time moves on. They who experience a national war must continue with the necessities of maintaining social status. Unexpected reversals of belief and other interior reassessments occur when experience enlightens what had been purely intellectual reasoning or shallow rote thinking. Not everyone survives after coming of age in a time of war. Living for decades as contented adults in individual customary and untested domestic cocoons is disrupted by the war. Through the vehicle of Russia's two wars with Napoleon, the Emperor of France, who gained power after the devastation of the French Revolution, Russia is forced as a nation and as individuals to test their beliefs against terrible reality.
Leo Tolstoy was a student of history and an authorial Lion of Literature. I am sure he realized the personalities of people have probably not changed for 50,000 years at least, no matter the culture. I hear people like the ones in the book (although mostly young adults or office workers from the middle-classes, not aristocrats) speaking and arguing of many of the same things as the people in the book. Everybody reflects on their own past experiences with that of others as well as bringing in what they could only imagine, or not. Ideas are gleaned from watching the news and listening to professional speeches and academic arguments.
For me, the personal philosophical/metaphysical assessments and arguments began with a war similar to the characters in the novel - the Vietnam war. The same conversations returned again with the Iraq war (I was 16 and 40 years of age, respectively - and yes, my views refined because of experience and maturity). Days and years passed while me and my friends earnestly and passionately argued and gave our opinions on how the wars should be conducted, why the war happened, and why it should or should not be conducted. Some people were angry at all of the political talk and wanted only to talk about their children, yardwork and house repairs; others were more interested in partying and hooking up and felt bored by these serious conversations; some thought we were fighting for the glory of God and country right or wrong; others thought these wars were only for the sake of Big Oil; some blamed political ambition; others felt strongly in the patriotic defense of Freedom/capitalism/democracy. All of the foregoing have analogies in 'War and Peace'. My personal coming-of-age intellectual development is strikingly and shockingly exactly the same as some of the characters in 'War and Peace'.
I have now lived through five or six wars and small international skirmishes with which America has been involved, and the loud conversations I have had with my circle is actually now distressing because such conversations are clearly never ending....damn it.
Some of you find the philosophical discussion in the Epilogue as dull as watching grass grow, but I was very interested given my own search for answers about the Human Condition. Tolstoy was a religious man. Like many, he clearly felt an obsession to work out why if there is a God why there also exists War. Both warring sides often enter into wars with the belief God ordained their success against the other. Why the eternal suffering and inhumanity of Men in personal relationships/society and in war, why the eternal economic and educational inequality, why no response from God (at least, these are things that the more rational of us wonder)? Can it be fixed (both meanings - "the fix is in" or "can it be repaired"), whose responsibility and IS there a responsibility to be Good, and why do the same battles between people, families, classes and nations cycle and recycle over and over generation after generation, decade after decade? I think Tolstoy believes no amount of rationality, religion or science can fix Humanity because for some known and clearly unknown reasons Humanity is under forces beyond our control, whether from Gods or the environment or genetics or everything. There is no Free Will. So concludes Tolstoy.
We are damned.
My version of 'War and Peace', translated by Anthony Briggs (there are thousands of translations, many in English since the 19th century), has in the back of the book:
-Appendix I: Summary of Chapters;
-Appendix 2: The Three Battles Schöngrabern, Austerlitz, Borodino;
-Notes;
-The Characters (the central ones are from the families of the Bezúkhovs, the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, the Kurágins, and the Drubetskóys.
-Four maps of the battles.
Lastly, there is a short biography of the book and Tolstoy, and on the translating difficulties of an author whose native style is repetitive and grammatically inaccurate in Russian, with run-on sentences of TMI (my writing style has somewhat the same issues except in my less-talented English prose, so, be warned, gentle reader).
This book's literary realism probably is most hated by students and most loved. It is a 1400-page door-stopper! There are extremely boring parts for some of us readers - lengthy philosophical and battlefield strategy sections, author editorials, domestic 19th-century customs and rituals. There is a foreign sensibility to everything for American English readers as it is written by a genuine 19th-century aristocrat about 19th-century aristocrats. I think all of the honest efforts of any translator of the Russian language into English will sound a bit 'off' for English speakers from naturally occurring translation impediments.
Taken all together, the book can be difficult to read. (I also have aching wrists and elbows from weeks of physically holding the gd book up.) However, despite all of the book's commonly noted defects by all readers, I think the novel fully deserves the accolades it has received from all over the world.
The book manages to encompass almost every personal adventure and intellectual thought ever experienced by most of Mankind at one point or another. The author wrote an uber book! Characters change as time moves on. They who experience a national war must continue with the necessities of maintaining social status. Unexpected reversals of belief and other interior reassessments occur when experience enlightens what had been purely intellectual reasoning or shallow rote thinking. Not everyone survives after coming of age in a time of war. Living for decades as contented adults in individual customary and untested domestic cocoons is disrupted by the war. Through the vehicle of Russia's two wars with Napoleon, the Emperor of France, who gained power after the devastation of the French Revolution, Russia is forced as a nation and as individuals to test their beliefs against terrible reality.
Leo Tolstoy was a student of history and an authorial Lion of Literature. I am sure he realized the personalities of people have probably not changed for 50,000 years at least, no matter the culture. I hear people like the ones in the book (although mostly young adults or office workers from the middle-classes, not aristocrats) speaking and arguing of many of the same things as the people in the book. Everybody reflects on their own past experiences with that of others as well as bringing in what they could only imagine, or not. Ideas are gleaned from watching the news and listening to professional speeches and academic arguments.
For me, the personal philosophical/metaphysical assessments and arguments began with a war similar to the characters in the novel - the Vietnam war. The same conversations returned again with the Iraq war (I was 16 and 40 years of age, respectively - and yes, my views refined because of experience and maturity). Days and years passed while me and my friends earnestly and passionately argued and gave our opinions on how the wars should be conducted, why the war happened, and why it should or should not be conducted. Some people were angry at all of the political talk and wanted only to talk about their children, yardwork and house repairs; others were more interested in partying and hooking up and felt bored by these serious conversations; some thought we were fighting for the glory of God and country right or wrong; others thought these wars were only for the sake of Big Oil; some blamed political ambition; others felt strongly in the patriotic defense of Freedom/capitalism/democracy. All of the foregoing have analogies in 'War and Peace'. My personal coming-of-age intellectual development is strikingly and shockingly exactly the same as some of the characters in 'War and Peace'.
I have now lived through five or six wars and small international skirmishes with which America has been involved, and the loud conversations I have had with my circle is actually now distressing because such conversations are clearly never ending....damn it.
Some of you find the philosophical discussion in the Epilogue as dull as watching grass grow, but I was very interested given my own search for answers about the Human Condition. Tolstoy was a religious man. Like many, he clearly felt an obsession to work out why if there is a God why there also exists War. Both warring sides often enter into wars with the belief God ordained their success against the other. Why the eternal suffering and inhumanity of Men in personal relationships/society and in war, why the eternal economic and educational inequality, why no response from God (at least, these are things that the more rational of us wonder)? Can it be fixed (both meanings - "the fix is in" or "can it be repaired"), whose responsibility and IS there a responsibility to be Good, and why do the same battles between people, families, classes and nations cycle and recycle over and over generation after generation, decade after decade? I think Tolstoy believes no amount of rationality, religion or science can fix Humanity because for some known and clearly unknown reasons Humanity is under forces beyond our control, whether from Gods or the environment or genetics or everything. There is no Free Will. So concludes Tolstoy.
We are damned.
My version of 'War and Peace', translated by Anthony Briggs (there are thousands of translations, many in English since the 19th century), has in the back of the book:
-Appendix I: Summary of Chapters;
-Appendix 2: The Three Battles Schöngrabern, Austerlitz, Borodino;
-Notes;
-The Characters (the central ones are from the families of the Bezúkhovs, the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, the Kurágins, and the Drubetskóys.
-Four maps of the battles.
Lastly, there is a short biography of the book and Tolstoy, and on the translating difficulties of an author whose native style is repetitive and grammatically inaccurate in Russian, with run-on sentences of TMI (my writing style has somewhat the same issues except in my less-talented English prose, so, be warned, gentle reader).
This book's literary realism probably is most hated by students and most loved. It is a 1400-page door-stopper! There are extremely boring parts for some of us readers - lengthy philosophical and battlefield strategy sections, author editorials, domestic 19th-century customs and rituals. There is a foreign sensibility to everything for American English readers as it is written by a genuine 19th-century aristocrat about 19th-century aristocrats. I think all of the honest efforts of any translator of the Russian language into English will sound a bit 'off' for English speakers from naturally occurring translation impediments.
Taken all together, the book can be difficult to read. (I also have aching wrists and elbows from weeks of physically holding the gd book up.) However, despite all of the book's commonly noted defects by all readers, I think the novel fully deserves the accolades it has received from all over the world.
challenging
emotional
reflective
I found myself disagreeing with a lot of Tolstoy’s assertions about the nature of free will and necessity at the end. The actual story of the book though is fantastic. It took me 13 months to read this, but that felt appropriate given the span of these characters’ lives we experience in the story. Life often felt both full and empty in turns while reading, meaningful and frivolous.
DO NOT BE AFRAID OF THIS BOOK.
I know it's 1392 pages long, but the they're a readable 1392 pages. Tolstoy has woven the lives of four families together with the Russian war with Napoleon as a backdrop. It's got everything you want in a book - love, betrayal, jealousy and duels, friendship and devotion. You know how you love to get lost in a book, and are disappointed when it's over? This one lasts a long, long time! Go ahead, read it! It's worth the effort.
I know it's 1392 pages long, but the they're a readable 1392 pages. Tolstoy has woven the lives of four families together with the Russian war with Napoleon as a backdrop. It's got everything you want in a book - love, betrayal, jealousy and duels, friendship and devotion. You know how you love to get lost in a book, and are disappointed when it's over? This one lasts a long, long time! Go ahead, read it! It's worth the effort.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Read it via Simon Haisell’s Footnotes & Tangents slow read