War and Peace in World Library Top 100 Books of All Time

Aug 21, 2008 Deanne rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classicliterature, 1001-books-2008, 1001bookstoreadbeforeyoudie

I really enjoyed this book. It's set during the Napoleonic war and uses the backdrop of Napoleon's invasion of Russia. An invasion which ended in disaster and the loss of life due in no small part to the Russian winter, and the burning of land as the Russians retreated.
Yes it's a daunting book in size, but well worth the hours even days reading it. ...more

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Aug 28, 2010 Lost Owl rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, top-100

The world's greatest novel. Everything is in here. ...more

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Jan 19, 2014 J_BlueFlower rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001, 1001-read, norwegian-100, catching-up-read

Yes, I freaking did it! I read War and Peace. That is one of the longest single books I have ever read. My edition was 1440 pages in two volumes, but the pages are 400-450 words. I rate it 3.5 stars. The story and the way it is told is awesome..... but it is just way too long. Why do we need to hear all these details about a peripheral characters leg dress and mustages? I think it could be shorten down to half with out loosing anything important.

Many people are unhappy about the mixture of ficti Yes, I freaking did it! I read War and Peace. That is one of the longest single books I have ever read. My edition was 1440 pages in two volumes, but the pages are 400-450 words. I rate it 3.5 stars. The story and the way it is told is awesome..... but it is just way too long. Why do we need to hear all these details about a peripheral characters leg dress and mustages? I think it could be shorten down to half with out loosing anything important.

Many people are unhappy about the mixture of fiction and the thesis on war, military and history. For me it was perfect. It worked really well, like seeing history unfold – and understanding it at the same time and not just afterwards. In particular the destruction of Napoleons army – how it enters Moscow and is absorbed. In the book it was perfect – in the epilogue it was way too much.

The book has a reputation for being hard to read due to the many characters. I found that to be untrue in general. Really there are only 5 main characters, and perhaps 5 lesser important that you really need to pay attention to. On the other hand the many peripheral characters are really confusing if you try to keep track on all of them. For example at some point Irina Vasilevna is mentioned ("The other day young Princess Irina Vasilevna came to see me; she was an awful sight—looked as if she had put two barrels on her arms "). The tone suggest to me that we should know who Irina Vasilevna is. Searching the ebook shows that she is only mentioned that one time. Could it be Helena Vasilevna? That doesn't sound right with "young Princess". There are a number of such persons being mentioned in such a way. Maybe it is just me that have been reading too much detective fiction and is paying way too much attention to details.... but such things are a bit confusing.

Or maybe the reputation for being hard to read is due to the last 30 pages? One looooooong essay on history and philosophy, free will and the connection to laws of history. And Tolstoy does not use any of those modern tricks of introduction or giving an overview or a bit of the conclusion in advance – or even a conclusion at all. The last 30 pages, was, “yes, I am almost done”, I could see the finish line of the marathon just to discover that there was a extra tour of 10 km.

My recommendation for future readers:
1) Get started. It is not hard – just long.
2) Do NOT look of family diagrams. I had a bit of the story spoiled by know who marries who.
3) A good map that helps placing many events:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?...

The rest is about Librivox:
I tried to speed up my reading with listening to parts of the book as the librivox.org audiobook https://librivox.org/group/267?primar...
It is a collaborate reading by many people, and the quality ranges from good, to bad, to really poor. The good ones are near professional quality, the bad ones are accented to a disturbing degree or the recording is bad quality with irrelevant background sounds or computer humming. The really poor ones are so bad that I simply could not understand sufficiently words to follow the story.

The files are usually about 5 to 15 minutes long following the chapters. Each single file started and ended by "this is war and peace chapter whatever, book whatnot read by such-and-such for librivox... etc etc" 20-25 seconds each time amount to several hours of wasted time. ...more

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Feb 11, 2019 Valerie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: top-100

I usually refrain from adding a rating star for my sheer "agreement," but I think I did that here. I think this is probably a 4.2 star book, but I agreed so heartily with Tolstoy's treatments of fate vs. will and collective results vs individualism that I probably added half a star to total 5.

I had not expected to like this so much, as I did not care for Anna Karenina. I had recently read Middlemarch, which I consider the superior work in a head-to-head comparison, but perhaps I missed some deep ...more

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