My Favorite Book is Pretentious

The dreaded question for a reader is this: what's your favorite book? It's almost impossible to answer, I have a list of over 200. And yet, for the past couple years I've known my answer: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Now I realize this is a really pretentious answer, and I have had people roll their eyes when I say it, but it did something to my brain when I first read it in 2019 and I've been obsessed with it ever since. 

Recently, I've been worried that maybe it isn't actually my favorite book and I've just been saying so for the shock and awe, because I was having trouble pinpointing just why I love it so much. And so, I committed to doing a re-read. Which is no small feet by the way, because it's 1,200 pages long and the print is very small and the cast of characters is huge. But I'm happy to say that I have accomplished my goal and my second reading cemented it as my favorite book. And I'll tell you why.

When I first read War and Peace a lot of things went over my head and I didn't truly understand any of the battles or war bits. This second time around I was fully invested and the war moments were some of my favorites. I think it's because I've thought about war much more deeply in the last couple years than I ever have before and I've read more perspectives on it. Earlier this year I read a lot of World War I poetry, which I highly recommend doing. World War I poetry perfectly captures the pointlessness of war and the feeling of losing faith in a cause; as you read it you can see these soldiers sitting in cold, muddy trenches wondering why they're even there. Tolstoy captures this exact same feeling in such a beautiful way and I found myself mesmerized by his passages on war. Some of his characters are soldiers who initially feel that to fight for their country will bring them glory, they see battle as a beautiful and heroic thing. And yet as they charge forward and see the horror around them they realize what it truly is. There's a beautiful passage where Nikolai Rostov is riding in his first cavalry charge and he wonders what he's doing there. He wonders why anyone on the opposing side could hate him or want to kill him, when there are people in his life who love him so much. There's a sense of, why do we as humans do this? Why do we choose to kill each other and go to war? What's the point? 

I told someone once that no book has made me feel human quite like War and Peace. The experience of reading this book is like none other, because Tolstoy captured human emotion, he captured the feeling of being alive. In my second reading, I kept noticing that when I sat down to read the world around me went quiet. When I would finish reading I had more appreciation for the world around me and I found myself looking up into the sky a lot. My favorite thing Tolstoy writes about, which I didn't notice the first time around, is the sky. To me, the sky is Tolstoy's central theme. When characters come to a life altering realization, when their life is about to change, or when their caught up in something they can't control, they look up at the sky and its vastness is comforting. There's an idea that the world around us doesn't matter, what we're doing to each other doesn't matter in the face of this vast universe that's around us. Battles are raging on the ground, but the sky is peaceful and it's there through everything. Everything may change, empires may rise and fall, history may be happening, but through it all the sky remains as it always has been. There's a beautiful passage where the characters Pierre and Andrei are talking about essentially the meaning of life. Pierre is trying to explain the concept that the universe is so much bigger than us, that we are part of something which is unknowable and large, that we are all connected; that is what the sky represents. 

War and Peace is about life, it's about history, it's about the human experience. Tolstoy rejected the idea that great men shape history. His work is centered around Napoleon and the French invasion of Russia, but Napoleon isn't actually that important in the grand scheme of things. For Tolstoy, the great individuals that historians are so obsessed with are not the movers of history. In fact, humans are simply tools of history who cannot escape the events that shape the world around them. The vivid characters that Tolstoy created find themselves caught up in these events and have to respond in whatever way they can. It's that which makes this novel feel so real, because who among us hasn't felt that they are simply living through huge historical events which they have no influence over and must simply endure. 

You have to saver War and Peace, it's long for a reason and I wouldn't take anything out. In order to fully appreciate this tome, you have to take your time. I usually suggest to people to read a little bit every day over a long period of time, live with it and appreciate the journey. You won't regret the time spent with these characters or the beautiful words that describe them. 

I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes which I have taken as my life mantra: "Once we’re thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it’s only here that the new and the good begins. As long as there’s life, there’s happiness. There’s much, much still to come.”

Note: I recommend reading the translation by Peaver and Volkhonsky.