Convince me not to drop this slog.I'm 60% in and I feel like I'm dragging myself to keep going. There are some good stuff with Pierre, but overall there's so much boring descriptions that I feel like it's mostly wasting my time.I've read most russian classics, even by Tolstoy, and never dropped any of them. This might be my first... unless (you) convince me it's worth it.
>>24821216Drop it and consider yourself filtered.
>>24821216I don't know how you made it this far, I dropped it within the first 300 pages. It's got to be the most boring book I've ever read, and I made it through Henry James.The difference between W&P and AK is like night and day.
>>24821216Why are you fags constantly complaining about books you're reading? It's like you're forcing yourself to read something just so you can say you've read it to impress others. That is vanity. If you haven't actually absorbed the information within the book and you aren't enjoying it then put it the fuck down and read something else.>"heh I just finished War and Peace. I'm so cultured">"oh, what's it about? um well, it's a slog. you'd just have to read it"I HATE /LIT/
>>24821216It's only a waste of time if you can't brag about having finished it
War and peace when I was growing up was the staple hardest book you could read according to adults
I have a big collection of russian classics and I've read a lot of it.War and Peace is the most boring book I've ever read, and I didn't got filtered by the setting, the russian names, the history parts, like most plebs do.The thing is that it's not a novel, but it sometimes tries to be one and fail.It's also at least 400 pages bigger than it should.Anna Karenina, and Dosto big works are on another level of depht, and it's not even close.
>>24821216War and Peace. A little too long. A rollicking historical novel written for the general reader, specifically for the young. Artistically unsatisfying. Cumbersome messages, didactic interludes, artificial coincidences. Uncritical of its historical sources.
>>24821246>just read something comfy and entertaining :) books aren't supposed to be a slog to get through!Are you 9 years old? Because that's the last time I read a book "to enjoy" it.
>>24821288Nta but then why do you read books?
>>24821288If you're getting value out of the book then you should be enjoying it. Simple as.Do you eat shit just to know what it tastes like?
>>248212911. Because it's a form of dopamine detox. You can't just spend all your time on the internet or with your casual hobbies or chatting with friends to have fun, you have to do something that makes you bored and grounded again, like meditation or reading. It's like modern self-flagellation.2. Because it's virtuous.3. Because not reading makes you stupid and a laughingstock. You don't want to be the guy in a room with bunch of smart people who hasn't read War and Peace. It's shameful.
My favorite parts are the burning of Moscow and the hussar raiding the French. Both come late in the book (duh), so I recommend you to keep reading :)
>>24821291Nta but to get more smarties, more pretty and original thoughts and better rhetoricising and shit and the like
>>24821288I read solely for fun.
>>24821319>Because not reading makes you stupid and a laughingstock>You don't want to be the guy in a room with bunch of smart people who hasn't read War and Peace. It's shameful.Holy shit you might actually be a retard. All you've admitted is that you have no capacity to think for yourself, you vain conformist fag. I don't read books to fit in, and neither should you. What the fuck are you doing.>yeah but smart people read this bookPoke those mother fuckers who've read War and Peace next time you see them. Seriously. Ask them what it's about, why it's interesting, what is so special about it, what made them want to keep reading, etc. Keep prodding. I guarantee you they will have little depth in those questions. Stop wasting your time trying to impress other retards.
>>24821216I quite liked it but I don't understand why it suddenly turned into a philosophical essay towards the end. I don't care if you hate the German view on warfare or if you think Kutusow didn't deserve all the hate he got. I wanna know what happened to Andrei! Is he alright?
>>24821216Tolstoy was basically a shitlib
>>24821343It's been a long time since I read it, but:>Ask them what it's about,A group of families and individuals in Russia during the time period surrounding Napolean's invasion. >why it's interestingRussian literature from that era is always interesting. The characters and the authors are very foreign but also familiar at the same time. You can definitely sense the Asian/European dichotomy. Also, his description of the battle was very good. >what is so special about itI don't know that there was anything particularly special about it other than being well-written and having good characters. His point of view on free will and fate is interesting, and worth some amount of consideration, but the same point has been made in many fewer words. >what made them want to keep readingI was interested in seeing what would happen next, where the characters would end up, how the story would end. Not much more reason than anyone keeps reading any novel, I suppose. Mostly just finished it just to finish it.
>>24821319You're the gayest fag I've ever seen in this site. You should do like the other anon said and eat shit so you taste-detox. It's not virtuous if you have such vain goals with it.
>>24821437Do you see how own your answers aren't convincing? For such an "important" book in literary history, look at how you responded:>why is it interesting?>"well Russian lit is interesting. Battle descriptions good."What the fuck.>why is it special?>"nothing in particular was special about it"Fucking lol.Thanks for proving me right. People read War and Peace and think it makes them sophisticated when actually it makes them retarded. Imagine reading 1200 pages of something without understanding much of anything and the reason for doing it was so that you could say you did it. Couldn't be me!
>>24821482I think the critical point you're missing is that I didn't read War and Peace for any other reason than for the pleasure of reading it. I don't particularly care whether it enlightened me or not.
Boring slog. And I say that having loved every Levin part in AK.
>>24821548Based. Reading is meant to be a fun activity, and too many people caught up in reading "teh bestest books evar" forget that part.>The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.
>>24821548If you truly read it because you enjoy it, then that is fine. That's one of the reasons I said anyone should read a book. OP though has said it's a slog (so stop reading it), and the other guy said he reads to look smart. Ridiculous.
OP here, I decided to read Shadow of the Wind next, and The Temple of the Golden Pavillion after.Wish me luck
>>24821482nie digger
>>24821216>Convince me not to drop this slog.No. Do it while you still can. I finished it thinking that maybe the ending was going to save it from being boring shit. Didn't happen, wasn't worth it.I still regret wasting so much time reading this crap.Gave it a second chance but nah. There isn't even a SINGLE good thing to say about war and peace. Anna Karenina is decent enough if you want to give it a try.
>>24821570I understand now. I agree.
>>24821339As do I. I enjoyed War And Peace except for Epilogue Part 2. You can skip that. It's pointless.
>>24821216I droppped it. It was boring shit of nothing ever happening. /lit/ has zero taste, they're just npcs who follow charts made by other tasteless faggots
>>24821246Hedonistic retard
>>24821319lost it at the 3rd
>>24821216I read it awhile ago and I think about his descriptions of how the further up the military rank you go the further you get from the fighting. The army standing as straight and tall as possible saluting the emperor. I think about his historical determinism theory. Most books I read and don’t think about at all. Pretty good value I’d say
Anna Karenina is still slaving away at my drawer for the last 2 years. Convince me to read it? I want someone to self insert in else I cannot have fun reading?
>>24822691It is the best romance novel ever written. You’ll feel like killing yourself after reading it.
>>24822701>It is the best romance novel ever written. You’ll feel like killing yourself after reading it.Sounds like it's right up my alley
>>24821216which translation? I just want to confirm something to myself. sometimes this is a personal-tastes-conflicting-with-the-translation-style issue
>>24821246Seriously it's just such fucking nonsense. Who the fuck reads 700 pages of a book just to say "actually guys I don't really like it, it's a bit boring for my taste" besides people who just want to brag about being able to read 700 pages?
>>24821246He is solely reading it to impress others, or to justify his intellectual self-image with a shallow imitation of stereotypically 'smart' activities and habits. In fact there is an entire cottage industry of content creation on YouTube dedicated to teaching people how to read difficult books, and the tone of such manuals lets you know they neither understood nor enjoyed the classic they slogged through in their dogged pursuit of prestige among idiots. Sure, reading purely for the sake of 'enjoyment' may sound vapid, but if you do not have the capacity to *enjoy* a Pynchon or a Shakespeare or a Tolstoy, there is little chance you will understand it, or derive from it anything other than soothing balm for your intellectual inferiority complex. Soothing balm whose medicinal effects are quite temporary.
>>24821288If you can't merely appreciate why these books are enjoyable then there is no chance you will come away from them enriched in any meaningful sense. These are not chemistry textbooks.
>>24821265If you are alluding to Dostoevsky’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigamarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search. Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity – all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of ”sinning their way to Jesus” or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, ”spilling Jesus all over the place." Crime and Punishment’s plot did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway. Dostoyevsky seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.
>>24821971If you found War and Peace boring, you have zero taste. Maybe John Grisham is more your pace.
>>24824770Eh, realists are boring in general. I'd rather reread Carroll or Rimbaud. Been thinking of trying Mallarme lately.
>>24824310To be fair, I can understand it with War and Peace. The book starts off as a character-driven narrative but gradually shifts toward historical nonfiction, especially in the second half, with increasingly detailed war sections that can get quite heavy or dull to read.Honestly, I respect people who drop books later on more than those who give up early.
>>24825174Tolstoy is generally regarded as bridging realism and modernism
>>24825289Anna death scene? Yeah, it was pretty good, great early example of stream-of-consciousness.
when i first read it i hated the essays but the older i get the more i start to identify with the idea i think he was trying to communicate. i still think they were a bad idea technically speaking, but id like to revisit them as standalone works
>>24821216It's my favourite book with crime and punishment :O
It saved me from going to war
