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A review by thekingcrusoe
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
5.0
So...here's my brief thoughts on all the individual volumes, including the mixed-reception Epilogues.
Volume I: Overall a really good introduction, even if it was tiny bit overwhelming with all the names and places and stuff. I learned early on the character interactions would be my favorite part of the book. The War section in this volume was underwhelming to me compared to characters.
Volume II: REALLY good. The war bits here are better than Volume I, but what really shines is the sheer amount of character interactions and events involving them that I just loved. Every bit of it was awesome.
Volume III: Mostly war in this volume, and exceedingly better than anything previous. Pretty great, but lacked a little bit of the character work I love - although the character interactions in greater context of the war was really good.
Volume IV: More of the character stuff I really really loved, and a tiny bit of war stuff that was also good. Historical philosophy was really good in this volume where the tiny bits of Philosophy in previous volumes were just...fine, at best.
Epilogue, Part I: I loved the end of Volume IV as it was, but the end of this was even better. Got to see some of that post-story interactions that was awesome. The historical philosophy in the first few chapters was also really good.
Epilogue, Part II: This parts controversial, but I surprisingly didn't hate it. Truthfully, that was all pretty good. I can see the issues people had with it but the thing is that I love religious and/or philosophical discourse and this was that in a way I rather enjoyed for the most part.
Instead of thinking about it in terms of ramblings, I thought about it as a series of essays talking about the themes of the novel - so not necessary, but nice for further reading - with the “repetitiveness” being the through-lines through which the essays were connected, and that worked for me.
The end talking about free will was a bit long though I admit, but the central ideas posited were interesting even if I disagree with him on a majority of it. The biggest problem was that Tolstoy got caught in up in weird technicalities that I think put him into a repeated Catch-22 that he couldn’t escape from until the last couple paragraphs when it finally made sense, hence these chapters being a bit long in the tooth. But overall, I honestly liked this part of the epilogue as well lol.
Was gonna be 4 stars if the whole of the Epilogue underperformed - if Part I was good and just Part II was bad I would've had to think about it for a while, but since not much of it disappointed, I will give this 5 stars.
Volume I: Overall a really good introduction, even if it was tiny bit overwhelming with all the names and places and stuff. I learned early on the character interactions would be my favorite part of the book. The War section in this volume was underwhelming to me compared to characters.
Volume II: REALLY good. The war bits here are better than Volume I, but what really shines is the sheer amount of character interactions and events involving them that I just loved. Every bit of it was awesome.
Volume III: Mostly war in this volume, and exceedingly better than anything previous. Pretty great, but lacked a little bit of the character work I love - although the character interactions in greater context of the war was really good.
Volume IV: More of the character stuff I really really loved, and a tiny bit of war stuff that was also good. Historical philosophy was really good in this volume where the tiny bits of Philosophy in previous volumes were just...fine, at best.
Epilogue, Part I: I loved the end of Volume IV as it was, but the end of this was even better. Got to see some of that post-story interactions that was awesome. The historical philosophy in the first few chapters was also really good.
Epilogue, Part II: This parts controversial, but I surprisingly didn't hate it. Truthfully, that was all pretty good. I can see the issues people had with it but the thing is that I love religious and/or philosophical discourse and this was that in a way I rather enjoyed for the most part.
Instead of thinking about it in terms of ramblings, I thought about it as a series of essays talking about the themes of the novel - so not necessary, but nice for further reading - with the “repetitiveness” being the through-lines through which the essays were connected, and that worked for me.
The end talking about free will was a bit long though I admit, but the central ideas posited were interesting even if I disagree with him on a majority of it. The biggest problem was that Tolstoy got caught in up in weird technicalities that I think put him into a repeated Catch-22 that he couldn’t escape from until the last couple paragraphs when it finally made sense, hence these chapters being a bit long in the tooth. But overall, I honestly liked this part of the epilogue as well lol.
Was gonna be 4 stars if the whole of the Epilogue underperformed - if Part I was good and just Part II was bad I would've had to think about it for a while, but since not much of it disappointed, I will give this 5 stars.