And with this book I completed ALL of my reading challenges this year! I will do a wrap up post (year, challenge and month) on either the 31st or 1st, but for the record this was the 11th book of the Back to the Classics Challenge, the 6th book (but 8th counted – two were double) for the Tea and Books Reading Challenge and the 25th Mount TBR book!
But what is MOST shocking is how much I enjoyed this novel. There were portions I hated that I think were decisions of the translator and there were definitely parts that were beyond boring (the war parts, obviously), but overall I actually am glad I read this book and the investment of just over three weeks was definitely worth it. I’m not going to lie and say that I was excited about this novel and I won’t even say that it was easy, but I was a bit confused after reading this in the forward:
“The first readers of War and Peace were certainly surprised, but often also bewildered and even dismayed by the book. They found it hard to identify the main characters, to discover anything like a plot, to see any connection between episodes, to understand the sudden leaps from fiction to history, from narration to philosophizing. There seemed to be no focus, no artistic unity to the work, no real beginning, and no resolution. It was as if the sheer mass of detail overwhelmed any design Tolstoy might have tried to impose on it.” (loc. 140)
I didn’t think that the novel was that confusing. I can definitely see where the characters names are confusing! The introduction discusses the multitude of ways a character’s name can be modified and that did cause me to stop a few times but if I kept reading the context clues almost immediately told me who Tolstoy referred to.
My thoughts still stand from the first two novels. This series is not as great as the other two of Riordan’s series, the publisher really should have invested in a better copy editor and I’m still not convinced about the ‘transcription’ part of the story (it brought the author into the story in a way that Percy Jackson didn’t). Aside from that, this was a great ending to a mediocre trilogy.
I know every one of you have been desperately waiting for this, the second episode of The Oddness Moving Bookcast! I’m impressed I was able to get it out on my two-week schedule as originally planned. I’ve recorded it in three different sittings so I’m sure I sound a little off at different times.
I just want to start by saying if by some odd chance you’re the publisher of this book, you need to pay for better copy writers. There were quite a few mistakes in this novel in the text and maybe it was part of the ‘style’ but I really doubt it.
Doctor Zhivago counts for three challenges, and actually wraps up one of my 2012 Challenges! It counts for the Back to the Classics Challenge (6 of 9), The Classics Club (12 of 100), and is my final book for the Tea and Books (8 of 8) challenge! I will do a wrap up post for the Tea and Books challenge early next week. For the Back to the Classics Challenge, this book was the novel from a place I realistically wouldn’t visit. After reading Doctor Zhivago and