(Note: this is not the exact cover of my edition, but it’ll work as a visual for my review.) So, I finally finished War and Peace as part of #warandpeace2019 and my #bookbucketlist after 6 months and 19 days of on and off reading! I ended up giving this book 🌟🌟🌟🌟 (4 stars) out of a possible five. Here is the review I posted over on Goodreads, and be aware, *there are SPOILERS*: “I tell you, this was one incredibly long read for me, but I honestly do feel a sense of accomplishment having tackled and finished one of the longest and most complex works of literature ever published. (I have not even thought of attempting In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.) There were times when Tolstoy’s philosophical musings got a bit sluggish for me when it came to readability. His characters, however, were complex, interesting, and their interactions and storylines played out like a soap opera. A lot of the main characters experienced growth throughout the course of the story (because Tolstoy himself did not call War and Peace a “novel”), but it’s pretty clear that the star of this story (the Victor Newman of this saga, if any soap opera fans are reading) is Pierre Bezukhov. He experiences growth financially (going from being a count’s illegitimate son to inheriting his father’s entire estate), spiritually (finding peace first with the Freemasons after letting his anger get himself into duel with his wife’s alleged lover, and then again after meeting Platon Karataev while being a prisoner of war, taken after a botched assassination attempt targeting Napoleon when Pierre was in the midst of a nervous breakdown), and personally (through his growing love for Natasha Rostova). There is love, lust, violence, war, and death in this story...a little bit of everything. It also encouraged me to learn more about the Napoleonic Wars, when most of this story is set, as well as events not covered in this story, but still instrumental in Tolstoy’s motivation to write this story in the first place: the Decembrist revolt, the exile of the Decembrists, and their pardon and return in 1856...” (to be continued in comments) https://www.instagram.com/p/B0HDgmApggs/?igshid=s8yu509ze6ug
