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The Iliad

by Homer

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Dec 16, 2025 08:03PM

Jayden is currently reading

War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

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Reading for the 4th time

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Jayden said: " I first heard about War and Peace reading the novel Wonder in year 6, where a girl starting high school is said to be reading War and Peace, as a way of telling us that she is now smart and grown up.

Cut to a few years ago when I was temporarily stayi I first heard about War and Peace reading the novel Wonder in year 6, where a girl starting high school is said to be reading War and Peace, as a way of telling us that she is now smart and grown up.

Cut to a few years ago when I was temporarily staying at my Nan’s place, and I borrowed a couple books from her shelf, including War and Peace, which for a few years just sat on my shelf collecting dust.

In August of 2023, in anticipation of Ridley Scott’s new Napoleon film, I was keen to watch some older films that were also about Napoleon. I scrolled through the “Napoleon” tag on movies and TV shows on IMDB. Films that I found were Abel Gance’s 1927 “Napoleon” and 1960 “The Battle of Austerlitz,” Sergey Bondarchuk’s 1970 “Waterloo,” and many adaptations of War and Peace.

Inspired now to finally pick it up and read it, partially to learn some more about Napoleon, I picked it up and read about 50 pages. I enjoyed what I read and got really into the world and the characters, but I got caught up with a couple other things around that time, including a scheduled re-read of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Realising that I couldn’t commit to reading War and Peace and giving it the time and attention it deserved, I put it back on my shelf for the time being.

Having just gotten out of a reading slump by reading Normal People and Dracula, I decided to finally read War and Peace in December 2024.

The copy that I had was a hardcover Barnes and Nobles edition, 700 pages long, split into 16 parts. In the month of December, I got halfway through the book, reading over 350 pages and finishing part 8. I took a small break from War and Peace to read Wicked and Sunrise on the Reaping, however it ended up taking me until the end of March to finally finish Wicked.

The hardcover copy that I was reading was quite heavy and chunky, and had some brown spots on the pages from sitting in a garage bookshelf for 30 years, so when getting back into W&P at the end of March I thought it would be nice to buy myself a nice paperback copy instead. I decided to purchase a Penguin Classic edition, which came with a nice cover and all the bells and whistles that can be expected from a Penguin Classic, including a chronology, an introduction, a translator’s note, endnotes, a list of characters, maps, a summary of chapters and an afterword. This copy is 1300 pages long and split into 17 parts across 4 volumes and an epilogue. However, upon discovering that the new copy that I had bought was a different translation to the hardcover, I thought it would be weird to change translations halfway through a novel, and that it would be best to finish the old hardcover edition, and leave the nice paperback on the shelf until one day I feel like reading War and Peace for a second time.

I then got curious and decided to read the first couple chapters of the new translation in the paperback. I found it very easy to read, and upon reading the beginning of the book again I discovered a lot of important information and context about some of the main characters that I had forgotten since beginning the book almost 4 months ago. The footnotes added by the translator also included a lot of historical and cultural context that I missed, having not been born a Russian in the 19th Century.

I also read through the chapter summaries at the end of the book to remind myself what had happened in the first half of the book, and I discovered there were quite a few more “chapter summaries” in this edition than “chapters” themselves in the edition I was reading up until now, and there were many events in these summaries that I did not remember at all. I did a quick a google search using the ISBN and discovered that the hardcover copy that I was reading was an abridged version of War and Peace written by a Russian Princess in the 1950s. Feeling that I had cheated myself of the true War and Peace experience and having lost my credibility as a Tolstoy nerd, I decided that I would commit to finishing the abridged copy, while also periodically reading through the complete unabridged copy from the beginning to fill in the gaps.

In the month of April, I read 170 pages of the abridged hardcover and 250 pages of the unabridged paperback. I did not read much in May, but in June I finished all 700 pages of the hardcover, and finished volume one (of four) of the paperback, which is just over 300 pages of the 1300-page novel.

At this point in time, I will say that I absolutely loved my experience reading War and Peace. What I loved most was the romantic drama, yearning and the sexual desires between all the young adults of the big families, particularly the adventures of the young Natasha.

For now, I am going to give it five stars and include it among my list of favourite books. I plan over the next 6 months to slowly read chunks of the unabridged copy in between the other books and novels I plan to read this year, eventually filling in the gaps to truly experience this work of literature. ...more "

progress:

(25%)
— Oct 22, 2025 06:19PM

Oct 22, 2025 06:19PM · see review