Five Quick Thoughts on "War and Peace"
The reader's equivalent of mountain climbing.
This book is not nearly as hard to read as its reputation would imply. It's long, but its chapters are short…no more than 10 pages, sometimes as few as 2.
Like a lot of Americans, I think of Russia as a land of communism and poverty. It's weird to realize that their 18th-century aristocracy was just as shallow and airheaded as the aristocracies of countries I'm more familiar with.
So that’s where Rocky and Bullwinkle got the names “Boris and Natasha” from.
The portrayal of Napoleon feels shockingly accurate to me. On the one hand, his early scenes showed him as the kind of leader who inspires people; on the other, his later scene with the envoy trying to stop the war is textbook narcissism. I haven't seen Ridley Scott's Napoleon yet; I'm interested in how it compares.
The last 40 pages or so of the book are pure historical philosophizing. They’re almost more work to get through than the other 1400.
But Boris's last name, Badenov, is an even deeper in-joke: it's a reference to the tsar (as even further popularized by Pushkin's play) Boris Godunov.
Was it worth it?