i have had the same struggles with Ulysses.

the main problem is that there are a few books which i "wish to have read"....the last time i forced myself through a difficult read (which i think was with Gravity's Rainbow) i told myself that life was too short.

still, the "pull" from these volumes is there.

Some books are legendary for the inability of just about any reader to get through them; W&P is one of the top of the list. It's like wading through mud; there's only so much you can take before you give up in exhaustion.

exactly!

I managed to get through it when I was about 20, but didn't count it as a favorite at that time. I liked the epilogues, which I thought wrapped up the stories very well. I guess it was worth reading the novel to get to the epilogues.

Rather than read it, you might be interested in hearing it read. Some years ago the Pacifica station in NYC (WBAI?) read the novel live over several days. They started with Tolstois granddaughter reading the first chapter, then many guest readers, including several varieties of celebrities, over the next few days. It was taped but disappeared for several years and was recently rediscovered. Sometimes they offer it on CDs during fund raising drives. I'm guessing that they are in MP3 format, so you could loadup your iPod for the next several weeks listening.

Great stuff, Mayank. My Great Books collection mocks and torments me while I read the pageturner paperbacks. Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, and Augustine ridicule me for my short attention span. You will be apalled to learn that I have made it only half-way through Emma three times. I have yet to meet a goal that I set for myself 15 years ago, to read the entirety of Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. That is my War and Peace. I am what they call a "starter." Twenty years ago, I was easily able to plow through Ibsen, Voltaire, Lorca, Dostoevsky, Nabokov. Nowadays, bleaagghhh .... I look at my guitar case sitting on the floor and think about the tactile, aural, and even geometrical pleasure that my Ibanez can so easily provide. I give in. Middlemarch goes back on the shelf. I hate this need to sacrifice one pursuit for another.

War and Peace is a good book to wrestle with, but if it doesn't give you pleasure, there's no point. I first read it in my teens, and it's one of the few that I go back to every few years. But my tastes were always weird. The longer and the more complex the book the better. Except for Ulysses.

There are very few books that I can think of that I started off disliking and ended up glad I had read. Those I disliked from the start remained a waste of time, then & now. I ditto that advice: if you don't enjoy it, then refer to Cliff's Notes & pass on to something you do enjoy; life's too short to torture yourself with literary dreck, no matter how classic.

i have a few that i've changed my mind about over time. Jane Eyre i absolutely hated in high school. but heck...i was 15! read it about five years later and loved. it.

I never cared much for Dickens until I got out of college and started again with Pickwick - where we should have started, instead of trying to plunge in to Tale of 2 Cities, which none of us were ready for, either content wise or stylistically. When you're 15 you don't really take it in that folks had a lot more time back then, so stories were more leisurely, etc. Now I can even read Thackery without fliching, but I admit W&P got the better of me & I finally quit even trying. Ditto 'Ulysses', but mainly because I consider Joyce to be a posturing gasbag (which of course is just my opinion).

I loved this!

I had the romantic notion that I would read War and Peace during the nine months of my first pregnancy.

Instead, I sat around watching the Golden Girls eating peanut butter.

I did make it halfway through, and though I found it tough, the odd thing is, it affected me like no other book. Must be that wrestling with it really impacted my imagination.

Thanks for a great read!

I think that W&P is perfect in every way; I read it recently on holiday and it did not leave my side until I had finished it (save for the second part of the epilogue where Tolstoy reflects on different schools of historians...). I think that it is the length of the book rather than the content that puts people off which is unfortunate. I feel privileged to have read it and cannot believe that I put it off for such a long time.

EmmaCB, I do not doubt that WP is a great classic. It is just that it hasn't happened to me. Yet. Once it does, even I will wonder that why I put it off for such a long time.

At the age of 15 I was ill in bed for a month and read W&P, have since forgotten most of it. But I do remember the whole experience took wing when I got to the parts with Natasha and Bolkonsky and Pierre. And the section where Pierre passes the oak tree refusing to leaf in April and then repasses it in its full late-spring glory and applies the "lesson" to his own life... The passage is still with me, still guides me.

PS: A sher for Pierre:

May birds forgive the tree that will not leaf
Until each past year's grief has flown away.

Apologies to whomever might have read the two preceding comments to Mayank's blog. I looked up the oak-and-late-spring passage in W&P and found it concerns Prince Andrei, not Pierre. So much for the vagaries of a reader's memory!

Peter, no need for apologies. I'm still awed. All cheers to you. I hope I will be able to enjoy that classic, too.

you'll get there, and you never know once it's done you might enjoy it. I've never read it myself but I've hear it has it moments. I perfer the movie with Audrey Hepburn.

I finished it last week, on the night before an exam. By far I struggled with the 2nd Epilogue where Tolstoy nit picks over free-will and taking the path of least resistance. But it's done and I'm very happy that I read it. It was a challenging book to read at times but the end result was a fantastic story that created over two months of enjoyment on my way to and from work.

Although, to tell you the truth, I really didn't begin to enjoy it until I got about 400 pages in. I think it's like beer, it's an acquired taste (and I still don't like beer!)

War and Peace seems to pop up during periods of catharsis in my life. Like your friend, I first read the great novel when I was 14 years old (finishing when I was 15). I had only recently been uprooted from a fairly typical Midwestern life of baseball , paper routes and piano lessons when my father decided to take a job as an engineer in Africa. I was sent to a boarding school in England. Before I left, my father handed me his copy of War and Peace and suggested I give it a try. At my new school, surrounded by long haired kids I could hardly understand, I was the American outcast at first. Out of a mixture of extreme homesickness and boredom with myself I gave it a go. After overcoming the daunting Russian names, I was hooked. For that first semester, Tolstoy was my best friend.

Fast forward about 10 years and I've just left a Christian commune after a shakeup at the top of the ministry revealed the usual grubby selfishness that seems to attach itself to those who hold the power in too many religious organizations. I was rethinking my beliefs and trying to reshape my life. For a summer I moved in with my sister and her new husband and worked a janitor job at night. In the afternoon, I would retreat to the backyard and read War and Peace. My old friend did not let me down. Inspired by him, I went back to school to study literature.

Finally, two years ago a book club I'm in decided to form a small subgroup that would tackle War and Peace. I was one of the few who joined. At the time, I had only recently become a quadriplegic as a result of a freakish bicycle accident. I was trying to make sense of a world that seemed tragically and cruelly random. Again, I retreated to the backyard with Tolstoy and again his magnificent opus on the great themes of life was like an arm around my shoulder.

This Christmas I gave my 20-year-old daughter a copy of Anna Karenina. She grew up with computers, the Sims, iTunes and 57 channels (with nothin' on) so I expected the book to end up with the other good ideas I've given her over the years, collecting dust in her bookshelves. But I underestimated the power of my old companion, and she's now halfway through the book. I think I'll have to give her a nice edition of War and Peace for her upcoming birthday.