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This actually made me look forward to reading Le Miserables and Moby Dick.
After four exceptionally grueling months of reading this, I've finished and moved it from my bookshelf back to the families' shared one. The first book is decent, but everything else is a trainwreck after that. Infinite yapping. Maybe this is because the English version was translated poorly but this book doesn't seem like it was edited even just a little.
Listen, okay, I don't mind a book with lots of ornate detail, but I do mind when the book has zero intention of emphasizing actually important events. I accidentally read over an ENTIRE CHARACTER'S DEATH because through my skimming I had just assumed it would be another meaningless yapping-based conversation about politics.
I think deep down, everyone knows a movie should not be longer than three hours unless it has a reason to. This is a book supposedly detailing a war in great depth throughout its course, so the one thousand something pages feels a little justified. Well, joke's on you! It's not: Tolstoy talks about the unimportant conversations between his unimportant meaningless copy paste with different generic Russian names characters for roughly 80% of the book, and the 20% that are war-centric are written with the charisma of a seventh grade history textbook.
Pierre staring at the comet of 1812 is beautiful, and all else is just "oh looks like Natasha's crying again about nothing" "oh looks like Sonya's crying again about nothing" "oh looks like Mary's crying again about nothing" Tolstoy's characters seemingly lack any personality to an extent even me in first grade could have beat him at. Pierre is seemingly the only character who feels like a real human being and not just a cardboard cutout that says boring rich person dialogue from time to time. Here, let me make a character calibre to something Tolstoy would write, if not better: "hello, I am Bob. I am angry. I am so mad because I tripped on the stairs to work. Grrrr. Anger."
The only thing I can really give this book credit for is that it was clearly made with a passion. No one writes a book this exceptionally boring without caring a lot about it. Swagmaster360 out, peace
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