"War and Peace," Parts V-VIII

The second portion of this book has picked up in pace, I suppose because all the characters have been introduced and the author can devote himself to plot. As I noted before, this work is very epic in its scope, and in some ways reads like a history textbook. This is fascinating in and of itself, as it is a period and topic with which I am relatively unfamiliar, and so as a historian I find it exciting, if a bit slow at times. I am also still looking for overall themes, which I am sure will become clearer as I get further into the book. I would like to posit that the title of the book is very important to the message of the story. The book is about "war and peace," but this can be interpreted in various ways. First, most obviously, it takes place during the time of the Napoleonic Wars involving Russia. So there is a comparision between wartime conditions and life, and the conditions and life during the sporadic peacetimes. Secondly, there is a parallel, between the international relations and the internal workings of society. The intrigues, the power plays, the courteousy, the game-playing, the climbing of the ranks. An interesting point. The society ladies are every bit as dangerous, in their own way, as Napoleon and Alexander. Other than that, I'm still waiting for overarching themes to develop. I would venture to say that, as of yet, the book is more of a character study than anything else. We shall see how this develops.

Also, various characters are changing, either for the better or for the worse.
*PLOT SPOILER ALERT* Perhaps the most surprising things to me were when Pierre encounters the Freemason and ultimately joins their ranks. I am interested to find out how this plays out. Initially at least, the mason was presented almost like a Christian apologist, and very much in a positive light. This is a bit bizarre to me. Of course I don't know what the end result will be. The second rather bizarre twist was twofold. First, Prince Andrei and Natasha's engagement was surprising, but happy. I was thrilled that two of the nicest characters were having such a nice romance and everything seemed to be working out. Secondly, however, her entanglement with Anatol has thrown a spanner into the works of the engagement, and also changed my opinion both of Natasha and of Sonya, who has suddenly become a more likeable character in my opinion. I think he pulled it off well, though, as far as making them both seem more real than they previously have. That's all the thoughts I have right now...

"War and Peace", Parts I-IV

So at this point I have read 200+ pages. So far I haven't decided what I think about the book. It's well written, very 19th century style which makes it a bit more difficult than, say, modern teen fiction, which has been my primary entertainment of late. I've read other works by Tolstoy, so I'm familiar with his style, as well as with the peculiarities of Russian literature as far as proper names are concerned. So I'm not having too much trouble following the story, although I'm afraid the temptation to skim the purely military bits is strong! This book seems to me to be the most epic in scope of the Tolstoy works that I've read. "Crime and Punishment" and "Anna Karenina," for instance, as well as short stories like "The Kreutzer Sonata," deal very much with one or two individuals' moral struggles. "War and Peace" seems to deal with the entire aristocracy, as represented by the various characters and families whose stories are all interconnected. This has, I think, made it a bit slower initially, because it takes longer to introduce the characters. I am finally starting to get to know them now, to distinguish the various formal names and pet names, even to understand their complex connections to one another. This is making the story more engaging.
There are a few characters who stand out to me so far as intriguing or hard to figure out. Pierre Bezukhof is one. I think he is a person who is very simple, not very subtle, but he has trouble understanding his own emotions. That is why he went along with Prince Vasili's connivances to get him married to Helene, that is why their relationship never worked. He is the strong silent type, not the dashing cavalier. Andrei and Lisa's relationship is a bit mysterious to me. Initially I felt that she was the sympathetic one and that he was uncaring, but now it seems that he is being treated as the noble character and she is superficial and selfish. Even her death seems selfish, dying with an expression that asks, "Why have you done this to me?" But it seems to me also that the female characters have less reality to them and more superficiality. I don't know if this is the case, although I wouldn't be surprised, as Tolstoy is a man and is limited by his own knowledge and understanding. But I will keep an open mind as I continue to follow the story, perhaps he hasn't yet gotten to the in-depth stories of various female characters. At the moment, my favorite characters are Princess Maria, Prince Andrei, Boris (because he's cute), Denisof, Pierre, and Nikolai Rostof (although he is also irritating, insofar as he is an accurate depiction of a teenage boy).

The Why and Wherefore

"The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book." ~André Maurois

Thus I begin The Great Reading Adventure. I have decided to start by working my way through the BBC list, since this presumably contains 100 of the most-read works available to the Western world. I shall probably add some of my own interests to the list as I go along. I have read 31 of these books, but most I have only a fuzzy recollection of at best. So I am going to start over, and work my way through all 100 books on the list, discussing each one. Here is the list:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - God
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I've already started "War and Peace", so that will be the first stop of my journey. Happy reading!