War and Peace

I've started War and Peace again. I have never actually finished it. It makes me think of Olga, just because it is Russian. I remember her saying that "Tolstoy is a beautiful philosopher," while the philosophy professors I got to chat with in Duluth generally and vaguely agreed with the statement that Tolstoy is "less of a philosopher and more of a classical pop-moralist." I have "read" (via librivox) many of his short stories, which I find beautiful and touching, and I have a general agreement with the morals that he has in them, which are normally not subtle. I do find much of his writing beautiful, and it is no accident or conspiracy that War and Peace is often considered among of the best novels ever produced by humankind. I first started War and Peace as an audiobook during the summer before I went to China for the first time, the summer of 2008. I continued to "read" (listen to) War and Peace during my first year in China (2008-2009). My entire time reading it was supplemented by Wikipedia and Sparknotes to deepen my understanding of all the complexities going on in the novel. I was not using these to replace the reading of the book, but rather to help me grasp and keep a mental hold on the multiple plot lines and dozens of named characters of varying important. Many of the names of which were completely foreign to me as well, having never been introduced to the Russian language before. An added complexity was that characters were often referred to by their titles (Count Bezukov) in some i passages and by personal names (Andrei) in others. But I managed to "read" it anyway. It was in intervals, though, depending on motivation and what chapters were available from librivox. At one point during the Spring of 2009 I had to stop for several months due to the fact that the next parts of the book hadn't been recorded and released yet. During the autumn of 2008 and the winter of 2009 I tended to listen to it on the bus while on my way somewhere or before I went to bed, so sometimes I would fall asleep midway through a chapter, missing important information. I would usually try to go back and listen to it again, but sometimes I would just continue on, satisfied with just knowing the general direction that the story was going, without bothering to re-listen to it in order to get all the details of a particular chapter. This was pretty slow going, with more nights in total spent not listening to War and Peace than listening to War and Peace. This was mostly due to the availability of the chapters on librivox rather than my own motivation, actually. There were certainly nights when I didn't feel like it, or when I was too exhausted, or when I had something better to do, but I do recall numerous times both during the fall and spring semester in Beijing that I spent the minutes before sleep listening to the adventures and the lives of Pierre and Andrei, the idealist and the cynic. The small islands of daily (or nightly) listening to War and Peace were surrounded by vast seas of waiting for the next section of the book to be released on librivox. I briefly resumed listening to War and Peace during the beginning of my senior year of college at Kalamazoo, and (spoiler alert) I recall that I got as far as the chapter describing the final moments of Andrei. I think that was about 90% of the way through the book. That is as far as I ever got. To this day I still haven't finished War and Peace, despite my claim that I have read it. As I am finishing Errant in Iberia though, a very mediocre read by my non-professional non-trained judgment, I think that I will replace it's presence on my currently-reading list with War and Peace, and hope to finish War and Peace before I leave Spain. Since War and Peace is apparently in the public domain, and is among the e-books available for free download via kindle, and I just so happen to have download it a few months ago when I started using kindle.