War and Peace is hailed as one of the best novels of all time. However, given its size, actually reading it is a real feat - you need a lot of time, motivation and patience. To give you an idea of how long this book is, there are 17 Books within it, some with over 30 chapters. Nonetheless, it was on my Bucket List and one of my goals for 2021 was to read it. In the end, I managed to read it in only two weeks and have some tips so you can too.
The first question is why do you want to read this book; this feat requires many hours and if you are just reading it to say you've read it, it is going to be a very painful task. Personally, I had wanted to read this classic for a couple of years but never had found the time. Since 2018, I have been trying to incorporate 'the classics' into my reading for several reasons. Not only has this allowed me to find some of my favourite books, but also to develop my own opinion on many of the greatest works of literature and explore new viewpoints. If you'd like to start reading more classics, I'd recommend starting with 'The Picture of Dorian Grey', 'The Handmaid's Tale', or 'To Kill a Mockingbird' to ease you in. Before going straight for War and Peace, I decided to give another of Tolstoy's works a go first: Anna Karenina. I enjoyed the storyline and writing style so decided I still wanted to tackle War and Peace. As the UK went into its third lockdown in January 2021, I realised there couldn't be a better time to accomplish this feat and started on my journey.
The thing with War and Peace is that it is not a challenging read in itself, it's just long. In my hard copy, the font was extremely small so I downloaded the iBook on my phone so as to not strain my eyes so much. This made the book 3008 pages at my desired font size. Being a very goal-oriented person, I aimed to read 600 pages each week, with the aim of finishing this book in 5 weeks. Now came the hardest part: actually starting. They say 'a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step' and never have I felt that to be more true.
Initially, I found it quite hard to remember the relationships between the characters and know who to focus on as there are over 600 characters throughout the novel, so I'd strongly recommend keeping a character list handy or a family tree. I kept the picture below saved on my phone and focussed on those specific characters as they appear throughout. Be careful when searching for character lists however, as last year I tried to find a character list for Gone With the Wind and read a massive spoiler from the get-go.
I truly started to enjoy War and Peace towards the end of Book 1, as at that point I met the Bolkonsky family, whom I found fascinating. At this point, all of the characters and families started to make sense in my head and I followed the relationships much more easily. At the end of each Book I read a summary on Sparknotes which really helped to consolidate the characters initially and ensured I hadn't missed any subtleties throughout. Surprisingly, by the end of my first week I'd superseded my goal of 600 pages and had managed to read 1000 pages whilst also making time for other activities (including learning how to skateboard and a coding course). At this point, I realised that it would be fairly easy to read War and Peace in three weeks instead of five, so I made that my new aim.
Many of the Classics that I've read have war chapters, including Catch-22 and Gone With the Wind, so I knew from previous experience that the war chapters wouldn't interest me as much as the other chapters. I'm not a massive fan of audiobooks in general, and find myself frequently getting distracted whilst listening to them, however I downloaded War and Peace as an audiobook and listened to the war chapters in double speed, whilst reading along, which really helped me to remain focussed throughout these chapters. As the title suggested, the war chapters are fundamental to this novel so if you also find war scenes quite dull usually, I'd strongly recommend giving this a go.
I got into the book very quickly and found myself reading in the evenings after work, as well as on the weekends (including over 900 pages in one day), allowing me to finish the whole novel in exactly two weeks. One massive benefit is that the chapters are very short, so although there are loads of them, it's very easy to just read a bit at a time, and before you know it you'll have finished the book!
*SPOILER ALERT* - The rest of this post contains spoilers!
Now for the hard part: what did I actually think of the book?
I always find it difficult to review very long books as I'm aware of the phenomenon of people rating things higher the more time they've spent on it. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed the storyline of this book, especially Pierre and Mary's exploration of religion and the different character's perspectives of the meaning of life (specifically Prince Andrew's and Pierre's in Book 5, Chapter 11 and the First Epilogue). Tolstoy has a unique way of portraying human nature through different characters, and one of my favourite themes in this novel was seeing how people's perceptions of others can change in an instant, for example, Prince Andrew before and after proposing to Natasha, and Pierre's views of Speranski.
A lot of the history in which this story is set I hadn't ever learned about in depth, so I really appreciated that element of the narrative and the interspersed maps throughout kept it interesting. Tolstoy thoroughly examines what power is, how history is told, and whether humans have free will; and despite typically finding these discussions rather repetitive and dull, I really enjoyed reading about Tolstoy's views on these matters and found the narrative very fascinating.
You may have realised that I've mentioned Gone With the Wind a couple times in this post, and one reason for that is because War and Peace reminded me of it in many ways: the sons going off to fight, the families fleeing their homes, the enemy's army taking over the homes, and the young women seeing the wounded soldiers and waiting for their loved ones to come back amongst other things. If you enjoyed either War and Peace or Gone With the Wind, I'd recommend reading the other too!
Finishing War and Peace truly feels like an accomplishment so if you're feeling like a challenge I hope my tips help! To see my other book reviews, click here.
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