I put Read War & Peace on my bucketlist when I made it a number of years ago. I can’t remember exactly why I put it on there. I think it was probably at least one of the following things:
1. The fact that I love reading and I wanted to put something related to reading on the list.
2. I’ve enjoyed the Russian literature that I have read.
3. Despite now having been there and being a bit underwhelmed by it, I have had a fascination with Russia for several years.
4. It is supposed to be a difficult book to read and I wanted to prove that I could do it.
5. I want to be able to say pretentiously to people that I have read it.
Jo bought me a lovely hardback version of the book for my birthday last year (now almost a year
ago), which I finished reading earlier this year. It took me several months to read. It’s a long book. But not only that, it’s a heavy book. That meant that it wasn’t too easy to transport and therefore I didn’t read it on the train which is my usual reading time. I ended up reading for a quarter of an hour every night before bed.
There are almost 600 characters and it isn’t really suited to this style of reading, especially with my concentration span. I would often forget who people were when I began reading the next day, let alone a few weeks later if they had gone out of the narrative for a while. As such, there are passages which I remember vividly – Pierre’s father’s death and the game of cards are two of them – and yet others which I barely remember happening at all.
This was brought out when we recently watched the BBC dramatisation of the novel. There were bits that I definitely don’t recall at all. Then again, there are bits which I am fairly sure Tolstoy didn’t write but were included because they were naughty bits and the BBC wanted ratings. It was really useful to see how it was condensed down to a 6 hour series, and I think I’m quite a visual person and being able to see the actors made it easier for me to remember which character was which, rather than getting lost in all of the words in the book.
I think I will definitely attempt to read it again at another point. I don’t think I got everything that I could out of it, however it won’t be for a while as my pile of books to read is almost as tall as me.
