War and Peace: Check!

Yesterday was a very good day. After an entire summer devoted exclusively to its reading, I finally finished War and Peace! "Why?" I can already hear the masses asking... well, you tell me. There are a few reasons. For one, even Charlie Brown characters reference W&P when they want to tell you what another book is not. "It's not like it's War and Peace or anything," people will say, and everyone nods like they understand what that means, even though they undoubtedly do not. So, I figured that if a book is good enough to be the litmus test by which every other book is undermined, then I should read said litmus test. Secondly, I read Anna Karenina a couple of years ago, almost by chance (chance here meaning that it was in the clearance bin at Books-A-Million, and anything in the clearance bin at Books-A-Million is sure to find its way into my car, house, and then stack-of-books-to-read-someday pile). And I LOVED it. I was blown away by Tolstoy's ability to make every part of life so very... real. And third, I, evidently because I enjoy torturing myself, am attempting to read the greatest 100 novels of all time. There is some disagreement as to whether W&P should be on that list, but I figured I better read it just in case.

I won't lie. There are parts that are tedious, and you have to trudge through them like a muddy Russian battlefield, as it were. I don't understand very much about war strategies, and which army should go where at what time, and to be honest, I don't care about it either. But every tedious explanation was more than made up for by the sections that were... absolutely... and... utterly... brilliant. Tolstoy has a way of creating clarity in a character that I have never seen in  another author. It's like every other person who has ever put pen to paper is writing their account of what they're seeing through a veil, and he is the only living (or dead, as the case may be) soul who can walk behind that veil and write the truth. Even as the characters are saying things that they believe to be true, he will show you by the slightest detail why they are lying, even to themselves. He will show you yourself, complete with all your fallacies and foibles, and basically make you see what a silly person you really are. And it's never obvious. They don't scream at you to notice them. It's like mining for... universal truth. Okay. That might be a little excessive. But you get the point. 

Which is, I genuinely feel like I am a better person for having read it, and I'm very glad I did. That being said, I fully intend for the next book I read to be something completely free of thought... Bridges of Madison County, maybe. Or even better, I just got a free copy of James Patterson's Swimsuit. Maybe that would do quite nicely.