“To think I might have died without having read it.” Those were the words of the late, great William F. Buckley. He was referring to Moby Dick. Having read it after he’d turned 50, Buckley’s love of the novel had him marveling at the very real possibility that he might have never gotten around to it.
Buckley’s quip comes to mind frequently with Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace top of mind. To be clear, I’ve never read it. But I want to. Badly. What keeps me from accomplishing the feat is the novel’s length in consideration of my desire to maintain my pace of non-fiction reading, plus I’ve heard it’s a very difficult story to follow, with hundreds of different names. But most of all, fear of failure is the biggest barrier to reading the novel. What if I can’t finish it?
A desire to summon the courage to jump off the proverbial War and Peace cliff was a big driver of my purchase of the great Viv Groskop’s 2018 book The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons From Russian Literature. As the title signals, Groskop has read more than one Tolstoy novel, along with countless other Russian writers. This is the excellent book she published before 2020’s similarly excellent Au Revoir, Tristesse: Lessons in Happiness from French Literature. Groskop’s descriptions of the novels, along with her application of them to her life and that of her readers, makes the reader of her books want to read every single one. So many books, so little time it seems.
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