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War & Peace -- Anyone here read it?...


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The most difficult thing for me was to want to continue reading it. I enjoyed the social insights, but can't recommend it as an enjoyable read. It's one of those books you read so you can boast you have, in my opinion. Anna Karenina looks to be more enjoyable. I started it, but with little kids I only get to read a page here and there of anything so I sent her back to the library to await a time when I can give her the attention she deserves.

 

Rosie

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I read it last year and really enjoyed it. It was a bit tedious at times, and yes, keeping up with the characters was challenging. I found that it got easier to keep up with everyone as I read--try not to get too bogged down with the characters at first--it will eventually "click" (well, that was my experience...). Oh, and it helps to read it often (even if it's just a page); don't let too much time go by in between readings.

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There may be people who want only to flaunt their literature "achievements", I suppose. I know the book is the butt of jokes.

 

I read the work because I wanted to and because I greatly enjoy much of 19th cent. European literature.

 

I hope you will be able to enjoy Anna Karenina when you find the time !

 

It's one of those books you read so you can boast you have, in my opinion.

Rosie

Edited by Orthodox6
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It's one of those books you read so you can boast you have, in my opinion.

 

That would be Joyce's Ulysses for me:tongue_smilie: Now that I am more mature, I'll have to try it again. My battered, ancient copy of War and Peace remains on my shelf because it is a most worthy read. In fact, now that you are posting about it, I am curious to reread it. The dc and I studied the relevant history this year.

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There may be people who want only to flaunt their literature "achievements", I suppose. I know the book is the butt of jokes.

 

I read the work because I wanted to and because I greatly enjoy much of 19th cent. European literature.

 

I hope you will be able to enjoy Anna Karenina when you find the time !

 

Well I enjoyed the four pages of 'Anna Karenina' I managed to read so I'm looking forward to being able to read the rest! 'War and Peace' is up there with 'A Tale of Two Cities' and The Great Gatsby' as books I will never read again; but I absolutely love Les Miserables and have read it about 4 times, I think. Lucky we've got so much to choose from! So, to the OP: We won't think badly of you if you don't like War and Peace, and we won't think badly of you if you do like it!

 

:)

Rosie

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You have me there ! I don't glean much from most "things French", so can't imagine even attempting Les Miserables ! (Swallowed a dose of Balzac many years ago, and haven't quite recovered.)

 

Recently I reread The Great Gatsby, just from curiosity about how I would react to the book from my current perch within "latter middle age". All I could remember from high school was the billboard featuring the cataract-afflicted drawing. Didn't remember much of actual storyline. Now I've reread it, I can't determine why the high schools consider it useful. Nothing "bad", just left me blank.

 

Somewhere on the Internet -- WTM? I don't know. -- I participated in a fun thread in which people posted about the rock-bottom worst book they were constrained to read during high school. Anybody game ?!

 

 

 

 

Well I enjoyed the four pages of 'Anna Karenina' I managed to read so I'm looking forward to being able to read the rest! 'War and Peace' is up there with 'A Tale of Two Cities' and The Great Gatsby' as books I will never read again; but I absolutely love Les Miserables and have read it about 4 times, I think. Lucky we've got so much to choose from! So, to the OP: We won't think badly of you if you don't like War and Peace, and we won't think badly of you if you do like it!

 

:)

Rosie

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Somewhere on the Internet -- WTM? I don't know. -- I participated in a fun thread in which people posted about the rock-bottom worst book they were constrained to read during high school. Anybody game ?!

 

I'll play. The Last of the Mohicans. OH. MY. WORD. :ack2:

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I read it at a time in my life when I had hours at a time in which to read, and I think that makes a difference. War and Peace may not be a book I personally could enjoy in 30 minute stretches late at night, which is unfortunately how I often seem to read now.

 

I read it when I was in my early 20s. I read it obsessively and was very caught up in the plot and the characters. At the time, I new almost nothing about the Napoleonic wars or Russian History, and I still was able to grasp the plot (I seem to recall consulting a reference for historical background).

 

I don't think it's a particularly hard novel to read and enjoy on a surface level. I am sure I missed much of what Tolstoy had to offer me, and perhaps I should read it again.

 

I read Anna Karenina at about the same age and enjoyed that too, but when I reread it three years ago, I understood so much more about life, marriage, love, women, men, history, grief and pride that it was a whole new novel. I suppose War and Peace would seem very different to me if I read it today.

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Rosie has it right:

We won't think badly of you if you don't like War and Peace, and we won't think badly of you if you do like it!

 

 

We each bring different levels of interest, knowledge, and experience to reading the same book. My point about mentioning Ulysses is that it is considered by many who are "into" literature to be one of the "ultimate" novels. I'm "into" lit. I wanted to like it. Hey, I would have settled for even understanding it...a little. It is the only time I have purposely inflicted pain on a book. One night in bed, my copy hit the ceiling and I broke the spine. Sacrilege! And it felt so good.

 

King's Kid, give it a whirl and don't worry about itone way or the other.

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Somewhere on the Internet -- WTM? I don't know. -- I participated in a fun thread in which people posted about the rock-bottom worst book they were constrained to read during high school. Anybody game ?!

 

I remember that thread! It was on the OrthodoxClassical yahoo group. It was so interesting how one person loved a book and others hated it!

 

In HS I couldn't make it through Great Expectations - maybe I should try again.

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I would very much appreciate someone telling me why 'The Great Gatsby' is such a classic. I found the characters so pathetic I couldn't even enjoy disliking them.

My mother in law attributed my dislike of 'A Tale of Two Cities' to my not being sentimental enough. I was glad someone liked it :)

 

Rosie

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My ultimate high school dislike was the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. So bad that...(hiding in shame!)...I cheated on the test! Ekkkk!!!

 

Grapes of Wrath was ok but so dismal. Red Badge of Courage was dull and boring but I'm going to try it again so it was probably the wretched, boring teacher. We read a Shakespeare a year and the only teacher to make me realize they could be decent was my 12th grade English teacher. She was the best! Mrs. Woodham.

 

Currently, I've read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in the last couple of months. The actual story and dialog was good but the on and on, boring, droning paragraphs describing every single fish and underwater land change was killing me! LOL It was good but I'll never read it again.

 

I'm finishing Three Musketeers which has been surprisingly great. Huge, but great. My next book has come in and it's Moby Dick. I'm scared; really scared. If Susan can't finish it, I don't stand a chance! LOL

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In HS I couldn't make it through Great Expectations - maybe I should try again.

 

Same here. 8th grade. We had the greatest English teacher in the history of the school. But the book.....ugh

 

I'm a math nerd, so Lit really throws me for a loop sometimes. I can't imagine Dickens sitting down to write any of his books for 8th-9th graders. Even if the syllables per sentence fit into *someone's* formula, I think more than a few of these high school literary endeavors do more to damage love of literature than to foster it.

 

Just my opinion, of course!

 

And if Dickens was really a teen novel author, I hope someone here lets me know how wrong my presumptions are! :)

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I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the original title of 'War and Peace' was 'War what is it good for' :biggrinjester:

 

I've read Ulysses, which is a challenge. Joyce wrote the ultimate difficult to read novel - Finnegan's Wake. It is written in about 5 languages and more complex than Ulysses.

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"Great Expectations" wasn't too bad, I thought. It'd be improved by a good editor, but I liked it more than other works of his. I think Dickens is best on the screen. If it's a musical, all the better! I realise not everyone is able to agree with this :)

 

Rosie

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I'm reading War and Peace right now, and it is not difficult at all. I HIGHLY (evangelically, obnoxiously, annoyingly even to strangers on the street) recommend the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Tolstoy is a really gorgeous, delicious writer and this translation retains some of that. Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

 

"Drops dripped. Quiet talk went on. Horses neighed and scuffled. Someone snored." It is a night scene, and one of the most haunting moments in the book. Other English versions translate the first sentence as "The branches dripped," "The trees were dripping," or, closer to the Russian, "Raindrops dripped." They all state a fact instead of rendering a sound, which (by a stroke of translator's luck) comes out almost the same in English as in Russian. (The Russian is "Kapli kapali.")

 

Another example: "The children were riding to Moscow on chairs and invited her to go with them." Some other translations of this read "The children were sitting on chairs playing at driving to Moscow." This fails to capture the charm of Tolstoy's words: he enters the children's play world completely and invites the reader in.

 

There is also a chart of "Principal Characters" in the book that give you all the names for each character and how each character is related.

 

Tolstoy fought in the Crimean War (I also looked at his "Sebastopol Stories") and he was one of the first to write about war without glossing over the messy bits. He had experienced both aristocratic parties as well as dirty, awful battles in which the leaders had made fatal decisions. He described "War and Peace" as neither fiction nor nonfiction. You know, if you've read "Gone with the Wind," it is actually similar in structure. One is most tempted to skip over the "war" parts to get back to the drawing room gossip. But the whole thing is quite enjoyable because the characters are so vividly drawn.

 

Happy reading!

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I actually read it in high school for class. And I remember absolutely nothing about it. :001_huh: I haven't yet been tempted to re-read it, but I'm slightly curious now. We'll see if that holds until morning (or if I decide to read something a little ... lighter... instead. :lol:)

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Well I enjoyed the four pages of 'Anna Karenina' I managed to read so I'm looking forward to being able to read the rest! 'War and Peace' is up there with 'A Tale of Two Cities' and The Great Gatsby' as books I will never read again; but I absolutely love Les Miserables and have read it about 4 times, I think. Lucky we've got so much to choose from! So, to the OP: We won't think badly of you if you don't like War and Peace, and we won't think badly of you if you do like it!

 

:)

Rosie

 

See, now I really liked War and Peace and Anna Karenina and Tale of Two Cities. I know I read The Great Gatsby in high school, but can't remember if I liked it or not.

 

The one book that I forced myself to finish just because 'it's a classic' and I couldn't leave it unfinished was Wuthering Heights. I couldn't stand that book.

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I read War and Peace about 14 years ago when I was about 30yo. I had watched the 1956 movie version, so I figured I'd try reading the book. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I don't know if I would have without seeing the movie first.

 

It always helps me to see a movie on a classic before reading it. I had to read Pride and Prejudice in high school. I thought it was soooo boring. But then, I was a TV addict, didn't read much, and hated every book I had to read in high school except Animal Farm. Anyway, I watched the Pride and Prejudice mini-series when it came on TV in 1995 and loved it. I decided to re-read the book and loved it. I saw the mini-series again a couple of years ago, watched every other P&P movie version I could find, re-read the book, and bought an audio CD set of the book (yesterday I finished listening to it *again* -- it's sometimes my entertainment during the drudgery of cooking and kitchen clean-up). It's now my favorite book. I also love other Jane Austen books, and I probably enjoy them more because of seeing their movies first, also. I'm sure my older age makes a difference, too.

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Somewhere on the Internet -- WTM? I don't know. -- I participated in a fun thread in which people posted about the rock-bottom worst book they were constrained to read during high school. Anybody game ?!

 

The Old Man and the Sea

 

And then we had to watch the movie...

 

I'm glad to see so many liked Anna Karenina, as that is set aside to be my vacation read this year.

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I remember that thread! It was on the OrthodoxClassical yahoo group. It was so interesting how one person loved a book and others hated it!

 

In HS I couldn't make it through Great Expectations - maybe I should try again.

 

I didn't like Great Expectations either, but it may have been because I'd read David Copperfield before it and liked that Dickens book a lot. I was disappointed with GE, perhaps because I found there was no character to admire. :001_huh:

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The version I picked up at the library (and I hadn't even known there were various versions!) turns out to be a newer and shorter version, by Andrew Bromfield, published only two years ago in 2007.

 

Uh oh... now I'm wondering about versions, LOL! :confused:

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I'm sure my older age makes a difference, too.

 

 

 

I've been wondering about this lately - we read classics in high school, but how much do we really understand them at that age? I read Madame Bovary a few months ago and absolutely loved it, but I can say that I probably wouldn't have felt it so acutely as a teenager (even the morose one that I was).

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