I have accomplished one of my goals. No all my boxes aren't unpacked yet!
But I did manage to finally finish reading War and Peace - all 1273 pages of it! I started in just as we left on our trip to Russia at the end of July and finished it last week. I think this move took away some of my reading time or zapped my energy so that I wanted to just relax with TV and not a book. Now that I have read it, I can certainly understand why it is considered one of the greatest novels of all time with some of the most unforgettable characters ever.
I learned a lot about Russia history and the Napoleonic wars. Typical of me, the war parts were not my favorites. The story of the people were what caught and held my interest. There is a great love story! Actually several great love stories! Michael Wilcox says that every man who reads War and Peace falls in love with Natasha. I can understand that as I fell in love with her myself. She just brims with joy through most of the book. And when she has her time of sorrow, I ached for her. And rejoiced at this sentence:
"Natasha's grief begam to be covered over by the impressions of ongoing life, it ceased to weigh with such tormenting pain on her heart, it began to become the past, and Natasha started to recover physically."
A few of my other favorite quotes:
"Pierre experienced the feeling of a man who has found what he was seeking under his own feet, while he had been straining his eyes looking far from himself.....Now he learned to see the great, the eternal, and the infinite in everything, and therefore, in order to see it, to enjoy contemplating it, he had naturally abandoned the spyglass he had been looking through over people's heads and joyfully contemplated the ever-changing, ever-great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him."
"In all the days of that anxious, memorable week, there had been that extraordinary autumn weather, always astonishing for people, when the low sun gives more heat than in spring, when everything glistens in the rarefied, clear air so that the eyes hurt, when the chest feels stronger and fresher inhaling the fragrant autumn air, when even the nights are warm and then in those dark, warm nights the sky, frightening and gladdening, ceaselessly pours down golden stars."
“You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.”
“We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them.”
But I did manage to finally finish reading War and Peace - all 1273 pages of it! I started in just as we left on our trip to Russia at the end of July and finished it last week. I think this move took away some of my reading time or zapped my energy so that I wanted to just relax with TV and not a book. Now that I have read it, I can certainly understand why it is considered one of the greatest novels of all time with some of the most unforgettable characters ever.
"Natasha's grief begam to be covered over by the impressions of ongoing life, it ceased to weigh with such tormenting pain on her heart, it began to become the past, and Natasha started to recover physically."
A few of my other favorite quotes:
"Pierre experienced the feeling of a man who has found what he was seeking under his own feet, while he had been straining his eyes looking far from himself.....Now he learned to see the great, the eternal, and the infinite in everything, and therefore, in order to see it, to enjoy contemplating it, he had naturally abandoned the spyglass he had been looking through over people's heads and joyfully contemplated the ever-changing, ever-great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him."
"In all the days of that anxious, memorable week, there had been that extraordinary autumn weather, always astonishing for people, when the low sun gives more heat than in spring, when everything glistens in the rarefied, clear air so that the eyes hurt, when the chest feels stronger and fresher inhaling the fragrant autumn air, when even the nights are warm and then in those dark, warm nights the sky, frightening and gladdening, ceaselessly pours down golden stars."
“You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.”
“We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them.”
“Pierre's insanity consisted in the face that he did not wait, as before, for personal reasons, which he called people's merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them.”
Don't be intimated by the 1200 pages. Truly it is quite easily readable. Tolstoy's genius is apparent on every page. Considered one of the first, historical fiction books as it combines fiction with meticulously researched history, Tolstoy himself didn't consider it a novel. His goal was to blur the line between fact and fiction to get closer to the truth.
At first, I had trouble keeping the characters straight with their Russian names and nicknames so I went back to the principal characters list many, many times. Believe me when I say that it was worth the all the effort.
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