War and Peace

For me, a major delight in reading War and Peace was Tolstoy's extraordinary ability to describe all facets of human interactions in vivid, convincing and engaging terms. The playfulness of children, the passion of love, the vice-like grip of impending doom, the exhilaration of triumph, fill the pages of War and Peace. It's very long and it's not a page turner in the way of some adventure stories or mysteries, but I wanted to pick it up again immediately whenever I had a few free moments. And some scenes are incandescent in their depiction of human joy.

I had been unaware of one unusual feature of War and Peace: The story embodies Tolstoy's views of history and, surprisingly, the narrative is interrupted at intervals by brief essays on history and historians. Some of this is interesting, but some becomes tedious. I have to admit, though, that Tolstoy used this mechanism to solve a common problem with great books: when you near the end of a book that is wonderful, you often wish that the book would never end. By concluding War and Peace with a lengthy disquisition on free will and history, you do indeed feel that the book will never end.