The same could be said for Lord of the Rings (and I personally am completely unable to muster any enthusiasm for Catch-22). What I’m trying to say is that War and Peace might end up defeating you, and there is nothing wrong with that. And while this book is neither as confusing nor as dull as its ponderous weight and aggressively small print might signal, it has a certain authentic convolutedness about it that doesn’t help the uninterested reader. To do this, he fictionalizes some characters-most notably, Napoleon and Alexander I-and creates a vast cast of new ones to tell the stories he thinks will help him explore these topics. It’s Tolstoy’s attempt to interrogate both a specific period of Russian history as well as the philosophy behind history itself.

War and Peace is more of an intricate collection of connected plots and philosophical treatises bound within the scope of a span of years at the start of the nineteenth century. Reading it, like a lot of so-called “great literature” can be an undertaking. I don’t think that War and Peace is difficult to read, but I’d agree that it is difficult to enjoy. It is nothing of the sort, which disappoints most people.

Marketing and tradition have cast War and Peace into the form of a novel, and so people read it with the expectations we have for novels (and especially modern novels). Indeed, some might downright loathe and despise it to its very core-others might just feel a kind of contemptuous indifference, similar to how I feel about cooked fruit on pizza. I realize that a few people in this world do not share the entirety of my life experience and world view, however, and as such might not fully appreciate the majesty of this novel. So this book is kind of a no-brainer for me. And, finally, I am interested in war, and I am interested in peace. I take perverse enjoyment from carrying 600 g (actual mass of this book) novels from place to place and figuring out new and inventive ways of juggling the book and a cup of tea while simultaneously trying to turn a page without snapping the book’s spine (or mine, for that matter). I am intensely but not indiscriminately interested in history-not just the particulars of history, mind you, but the ways in which history happens. I am a rigorously-educated, uber-literate intellectual who lives high enough up the ivory tower to get nose bleeds but not so high that I need an oxygen mask. There are a few different types of people who read War and Peace.

War and peace leo