when I bought this at a local little book store, the owner told me "good luck. I've tried twice and couldn't get through it..."

sad to say this has to go on hold. I have another huge book to read and then I'll get back to this beast!

Tolstroy's epic masterpiece intertwines the lives of private and public individuals during the time of the Napoleonic wars and the French Invasion of Russia.

I had always wanted to read this epic Novel by Tolstroy's but was completely put off by the sheer size of the book at 1350 pages. I am not a lover of books over 500 pages and this was certainly going to be a challenge for me.

I have planned a trip to Russia this year and this was the encouragement I needed to finally pick up this novel, also the fact that the BBC had filmed a new adaptation of the novel which had aired in January and it was getting great reviews. So I approached the masterpiece by ordering a hard copy as I wasn't sure I could handle this one on Kindle. I also taped the complete BBC Series and decided I would watch the first episode to get the characters, names and places firmly set in my head and then read the book as a side read over a three month period(finished it in 6 weeks)

I finally finished this masterpiece last night and really did enjoy the read. Today( Mother's day) I sat down and watched several hours of Television Series and really enjoyed so much having completed the book.

1812 napoleon invades Russia in an order to expand his ever-growing Empire. Three Russian families of Nobility The Rostovs, The Bolkonskys and the Bezukonskys become intertwined and an immense story of War, Romance, Riches, betrayals, jealously and hatred make this story so compelling.

This is not an easy read by any means as it is a challenge, with all the war descriptions and long descriptive passages and at time dialogs that tends to go on and on and yet its story and characters are amazing and I found myself engrossed and loved picking up the book and getting back to the characters.

This is not a book I would recommend friends to read, but if like myself you want a challenge and this is on your TBR List then I would encourage you to read it over a period of time and I think you will be surprised at how readable and enjoyable it really is.

I have to applaud the BBC Series which was extremely well adapted to screen and very close to the actual book except for the accents! ( )

A long read, once abandoned a tenth-way through, looked at multiply with promise to be picked up and read again and thoroughly enjoyed after reading it to completion this time round. A wonderful story, that just as the title suggests, starts with the beginning of a war and ends at the end of the war.

I expected a lot more patriotism, there's still some level of patriotism, and heightened national praise. The characters weren't as hard to keep up with as I thought they'd be either, the lengthiness of the book shouldn't have intimidated me as it did. This story follows members of upper class Russian society during this period of war and their families, love affairs, marriages, roles in the war, losses and death resulting from the war. I certainly loved the love bits and ordinary life passages more than I did the war bits that seemed to drag on after several hundreds of pages of it, and the analysis of the history from this period. ( )

Oh dear. Oh dear. How to explain? I started this at the beginning of the summer and chose to listen to the audiobook because summer in Toronto means construction. As in you can't really drive from anywhere to anywhere in less than an hour and I wanted a good long listen for the season. At first, I could hardly contain my gushing. I was madly, deeply in love with this novel. The action! The characters! The setting! The detail! And I continued to feel that way until about the 70% mark. And then I found myself choosing to listen to a few chapters of some other novel. And a few more. I went from having to drive though Tim Horton's and sit in the parking lot because I just could not stand to turn off the audio to having to bribe myself to keep on listening. What went wrong for me? Firstly, I started to weary of Tolstoy lecturing me. I understood the first time he gave me his view of history and the players who take centre stage in it. He started to interject more and more of these lectures and rightly or wrongly, they started to feel longer and longer and more berating as the novel went on. The ratio of action to lecture seemed to shrink. Then I started to get seriously annoyed by Pierre. It had seemed to me from the beginning that the admiration he was given was not commensurate with the man. I thought that he would grow. But even though he is incredibly well seasoned with all of his experiences in the war, his travel, his very life, it seemed to me that he was virtually unmarked by all of it. I can not fathom Tolstoy's admiration of this character. I lost interest. Do what I might, I have not been able to convince myself that I should finish the darn thing. I still give it five stars because 70% of it was far far far better than hundreds of novels I have read. By rights this should go on my unfinished shelf. ( )

I want to give this 5 stars, but there were a few parts that really dragged for me and seemed needlessly bloated. It took me probably 900 pages to really understand this mammoth of a novel, if you can call it that, because Tolstoy didn't see this as a "novel". The second epilogue is interesting but seems misplaced and repetitive as Tolstoy tells the reader over and over again what his theory on the science of history is.

Anyway, there is a lot to say about this book but at this point I am a little burned out. It was LONG. Part of the challenge in reading this isn't that it is hard to understand or overly complicated (other than the 400 names) but rather in its sheer epic length. It is daunting. It is scary. But it is doable.

This was my first venture into Russian literature and I enjoyed it. I plan on reading more Tolstoy because of this book. It is easy to see, once you have read it in its entirety (and I do believe that is necessary, pushing through it even when it gets tough, to understand its value) why this is a classic. ( )