Okay, so I’ve been hacking away at Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the “Mount Everest of
Novels,” since February 15. That’s 73 days to date. Ten-and-a-half weeks. I’m
averaging about thirteen pages a day, and at this rate I’ll finish it in about
five weeks. Which puts my completion of the novel around the beginning of June.
It’s taking me so long that I can only think offhand
of a couple of other books which demanded the same amount of time devotion. My
first read-through of the Bible, Genesis to Revelation, way way back in 1992,
took me two solid months. A typical journey through The Lord of the Rings takes me 35-40 days. The slog through the
paperback version of Hegel’s combined works took four months, to the day. Similarly, Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon was an exhaustive
four-and-a-half month voyage, but that was back in 2008, when I had quite the
stressful job, infant, and toddler to juggle. More in line with our current subject,
when I read Napoleon: A Life, I watched
54 days fly off the daily calendar.
Yeah, but it’s the journey, not the destination, you
say. And you’d be correct. But … I’ve never had good luck with the great Russian
novelists. I gave up on The Brothers
Karamazov, twice. And this is my second attempt at War and Peace. I’d love to read Crime
and Punishment sometime in the near future, but I’m a-scaird to. All this
is a long-winded way of saying that, during these 73 days trekking through the
Mount Everest of Novels, I’ve made not one, not two, but three detours.
The first was a slim paperback concerning conspiracy
theories, given to me by a relative. Interesting, but ultimately not
convincing. I reshelved Tolstoy for a solid week at the beginning of March and
read through this new paperback in seven days. Then I returned to Russia of the
early 1800s.
For another two weeks. This time I got up the novel’s
mid-way point, the end of Book VII. I stayed within the same chronological
period and detoured with a Sharpe book. You know, one of those thirteen
paperbacks I spreed on back around Christmastime concerning English rifleman
Richard Sharpe and his escapades against Napoleon’s Grande Armée. This was fun;
paradoxically very close to what I was reading in Tolstoy yet 180-degrees away
from it. And again I re-bent my literary nose to the grindstone that is War and Peace.
I quickly put another 200 pages behind me, finishing
up Book X. Now I selected up a slim paperback which heartened to my bookmobile
youth, Jules Verne’s Around the World in
80 Days. Just finished that last night, a quick, satisfying, page-turning
return to simpler, war-free times (although Verne did write it while France was
getting it’s butt kicked by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War). I enjoyed it
as a fond memory of my youth. I recalled seeing the movie ages ago, loving the
soundtrack, loving the simpler, gentler Hollywood that produced it. Nice
memories.
Now, returning from lunch, I returned to War and Peace. I am now three chapters
in to Book XI. Have about 450 pages to go, so I just may put the reading
blinders on and plow on through to the epilogues (there are two in this book).
And maybe up my daily page count so I can get it done earlier.
So many books to read, so little time …
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