Review - War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace was one of those books I always intended to get round to, someday, when I had more time. Since I'm unlikely to find myself with more free time than I have now in the future, it's probably for the best that my dad dared me to read the whole book -- he was quite specific about this -- including the epilogue. The whole epilogue. In translation, obviously, although he did jokingly suggest I learn Russian first and try it then.

I have to say, I loved it. The quote on the spine of my edition is: "It's a book that you don't just read, you live." And to some extent, that's true. I started out reading it intending to read one hundred pages a day -- a pretty easy goal for me, and one I thought I could keep up, even if I found the book boring. Then one day I had quite a bit of free time and... I read three hundred pages in a single day. And after that, the book was virtually never out of my hand, unless I needed both hands to eat dinner or play a video game (or, to be realistic, type -- I live and die a ten fingered typist). It went everywhere with me.

The characters in this book came to life in my head. I loved the Rostovs, aww'd at Pierre, and adored Andrei. I didn't think I'd like the old Prince Bolkonsky, but I ended up loving him too. The characters are written so well. There's so many of them, yet they all stick in my head. Every single one of them had some life, even if they whirled in and out of the story and had only a handful of chapters they even appeared in. Obviously, I'm no judge of the accuracy of the translation, but I liked the way it was written.

The thing I didn't get on so well with was the philosophising about war. I'm not very familiar with the period in history discussed, so I had a little trouble following that. The second part of the epilogue struck me as both unnecessary -- the main narrative got all those points across -- and extremely boring. In fact, I sort of wondered how Tolstoy had got a time travel machine and sat in on my Religious Studies A Level, because a lot of the stuff about free will came right out of my syllabus. (I concluded he was probably a soft determinist, in case anyone wanted to know.)

I'm giving it five stars (which, on goodreads, means "it was amazing") because it sucked me in so much and made me care so much, despite the bits I didn't so much enjoy.

Review - Heart of Darkness

I found Conrad's Heart of Darkness very easy to read. My copy was only one hundred and twelve pages long, so there's that, but it's also written in a way that tugs you into the story. Actually, I think it's probably best read in one sitting, due to the way it's written -- the actual story is being told by a man called Marlow, to his companions, who mostly just sit quiet and listen, in one sitting. So to experience the book as it was written, it's probably best to settle down with it and read the whole story at once. I found the prose pretty easy, though that might just be that I'm somewhat used to that kind of slow, elaborate writing style. A lot of the imagery in the book is very vivid, which I liked.

Maybe I should have read it a little more slowly and carefully, but I felt sometimes that it lurched from one point to another and it took me a minute to catch up.

I don't really "get" this book, I guess. I can see how to analyse it and pick it apart -- this bit of imagery refers also to that, and this reflects that, and the racism springs from the culture it was written in, and blahblahblah. I can see how you can pick all kinds of special meaning out of it. But... I'm not so impressed that I want to.