So yesterday, when I was linking around to finishing the Classics Club Spin #3, I found out that it was Classics Club Spin #4. So, since reading War and Peace made me smarter, I thought I’d do it again. Of course, yesterday was the day they picked the spin number and I clicked that post first (stupidly), so I made my list and then used random.org to pick a new number so I couldn’t be accused of influencing my outcome. Geoff saw my random.org selection, so he can vouch for me for not cheating.

I picked books that I have on my shelf. Luckily, all my Solzhenitsyn books are on a shelf that I didn’t get to, so there was no chance of another long, Russian, hyper-realistic novel on the list.

1. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
2. Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. The Good Earth by Pearl Luke
4. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
5. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
6. The Warden by Anthony Trollope
7. 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
8. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
9. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
10. The Overcoat and Other Stories by Nikolai Gogol
11. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
12. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
13. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
14. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
15. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
16. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
17. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
18. The Sound and the Fury by William Falkner
19. Tess of the d’Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
20. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka

And the lucky number was fourteen. So I will be reading The Scarlet Letter.

Also, saddened by how few women are on this list, if I do Classics Club Spin #5, I’m going to make an all-woman list and choose from that.

So, wish me luck. This seems more doable in the time frame suggested (by January 1) than War and Peace.

So last night I powered through Epilogue Chapter II and am done War and Peace. I failed the Classics Club Challenge of finishing by October 1st. But I finished and it was 1356 pages in ten point font, so maybe taking a long time because I spent lots of time playing Plants Vs Zombies 2 and reading other books, most not very interesting, is acceptable.

Now the meat: what did I think of War and Peace?

Have you ever seen those colour bars where it starts of white on one side and ends up black on the other and gradually shades to grey in between? Here’s a picture of what I mean:

So War and Peace has two threads – the story and Tolstoi’s philosophy about history, free-will, great men, etc., which I will call Tolstoi spew. And we start off in white – all story, but it gets greyer and greyer as more of Tolstoi spew gets mixed in, until you get to Epilogue Chapter II, which is all Tolstoi spew and that I read while recovering from a sinus cold so I’m not one hundred percent sure I really understood the last forty pages in the way they are meant to be understood, but I will summarize as best I can, which is History is not all the reasons why and wherefore about great men. History is the entirety of everything that came before and everyone involved and no one and no thing can be ignored or left out. In other words, history is unknowable due to its massiveness. Maybe a philosopher can come along and tell me whether my assessment is correct or not. Doesn’t matter I am done. Epilogue Chapter II will not be revisited.

Now, I had fair warning about Tolstoi spew. Geoff told me You’ll probably be fine until nearer to the end. I’ve read Anna Karenina, which also has it’s fair share of Tolstoi spew, although I remember that there Levin’s speeches about emancipation of the peasants and women’s rights were more woven in throughout the text, not dumped heavily nearer and nearer the end, but I did read Anna Karenina over ten years ago, so I may be mis-remembering. But, as with Anna Karenina, I wanted to spend more time with the characters of War and Peace. As with finishing any massive book, I am sad that I am done. I am sad that there is no more of Nikolay and Marya and Sonya and Natasha et al. I carried that heavy book around for three months. Now I have to find something else to do while waiting for Tesfa’s art classes to finish and something else to search for on wikipedia when I don’t understand the historical references.

As for content: we’re going along swimmingly, then the book just ends. Everyone who is still alive pairs off, rather unhappily it seems, although since all happy families are alike, the friction and angst and malaise of the remaining couples makes sense in a Tolstoied universe. The last, non Tolstoi spew, scene is someone vowing to make his father proud of him, and then fade to black. It’s unsatisfying. If I go to, as I always do when comparing very long books, to Infinite Jest, another book which just ends, there’s a much more satisfying ending there because it ends a cycle of the novel or a spiral of the novel; whatever one wishes to call it, it ends something concrete and contained. War and Peace just stops and switches to Tolstoi spew and then I get annoyed because I invested a lot of time and energy and emotion into knowing these people and they are simply abandoned to make some point about the wide, infiniteness of history. That is unfair.

Some other notes:

The version I have has the peasants all speaking in, what I assume is meant to be, cockney accents, dropping aitches and ending letters with lots of apostrophes to denote the missing letters. Is this true for all English versions? Denisov as well, his lisp is written out phonetically (w‘s rather than r‘s). Sometimes this was wearisome.

In the Russian version, when the characters speak French, do they actually switch from the Cyrillic Russian to the Latin French alphabet and then speak in French since Tolstoi might have assumed that most of the literati reading his book would speak passable French? Probably it just says as it does in my English version They said in French but says whatever they said in French in Russian.

The short sections within each chapter (two or three pages) was quite useful for a long novel. I could quickly pick the book up and read a tiny bit, while doing other things. That’s a plus for a long, detailed novel.

In conclusion:

It’s good I read War and Peace. I get so caught up in contemporary fiction and contemporary tropes and contemporary situations, it helps put me in a differing headspace to read something so secure and antiquarian. It reminds me to focus. War and Peace is not a novel, even though I mentioned its short sections for easy stop-starting, meant to be read while unfocused. People used to read I think while flipping over the next of my tissue-paper thin pages. Really read difficult, time-consuming novels. And I get distracted after ten minutes and think Oh, I should check my e-mail even though I get, on average, -4 emails a day.

So, it’s like your high school English teacher told you: Reading the classics will make you a better person.

Addendum:

Geoff and I were standing at our unorganised bookshelf yesterday trying to find a specific book (Rebecca). We have, on our shelf, Finnegan’s Wake. Geoff has read about five pages. I have read one paragraph.

Geoff: Here’s what you should read next.

He hands me Finnegan’s Wake.

Geoff: You’ll stop complaining about the random Tolstoi interjections after this.

Me: Do you really want me to read this? I won’t even bother trying to understand it. I’ll read ten pages a day and let the words wash over me the way I do when I read Proust. Then I’ll lord it over your head for the rest of your life that I read all of Finnegan’s Wake and you didn’t. Are you sure that’s what you want?

Also, I have much more Proust to get through before Geoff dies.

There. I said it. I hate e-books.

I feel like my acceptance of new technology has sort of assymptoted to a dead, flat-line. The curve started high: I was programming in GW-Basic at seven, I was on the robotics team in high school, but somewhere around university, I just stopped caring. I got my first cellphone in 2009. I’ve had the same computer for three years. I am two consoles behind at this point (PS2). And I don’t mind at all.

I have an iPad. I did not pay for the iPad (living the dream as Moss would say) but got it in a barter. The first apps I put on it were kobo and kindle. I got some e-books with a gift certificate I got at my old job before I quit for having organized an awesome conference. I downloaded a bunch of Project Gutenberg classics to make myself more intelligent.

And then I started reading e-books on the iPad and realized how much I hate them.

It doesn’t help that the kobo app kept freezing. It doesn’t help that you can’t easily search in books downloaded from overdrive, which is the New Brunswick library’s e-book system. It also doesn’t help that the New Brunswick library’s e-book system is much like the New Brunswick library – as much Ted Dekker and Harlan Coben and Mary Higgins Clark as you can get your hands on, and those are not books that interest me. It doesn’t help that the iPad I have is heavy and hurts my wrists when I hold it. It doesn’t help that the screen doesn’t have all that fancy stuff that the kobo is always advertising – like true ink or whatever they call it – and I get a headache staring at the screen for too long. Also, e-books drain the battery quickly it seems, even though I change it to a black background and dim the screen. So I have to plug-in the iPad while I’m reading which defeats the purpose of reading anywhere.

But mostly, it doesn’t help that many of the e-books I’ve read, a lot that I’ve gotten to review from librarything are also not my style, so now when I start reading anything, I can’t get over the prejudice I have that anyone can publish an e-book and I don’t want to read anyone – I want to read good, meaningful, deep stories that dig me out from the inside. I have read three-ish good e-books on the iPad – I Am Forbidden, HHhH, and I am half-way through Little Children, so good books exist in e-book form I tell myself. I force myself to read slowly and not skim.

But I still hate it.

I like paperback novels. I even like the words paperback novel. I have a goal to write a book and call it Paperback Novel. I have no goal to write an e-book, even though that is the way publishing is going, even though when I’m finished my course and have firmly established (actually, I’ve firmly established it now, but will pretend that there is some submission that I will send to my course mentor that she will suddenly see all the pieces coming together and be impressed with me and that will give me the push to keep going to the end of April) that Come From Away should just die a quiet e-book death, I do not want an e-book only world. Radio still exists for people in cars. Maybe books can still exist for people with spotty electricity. Maybe I should get an axe and chop down some power lines in my neighbourhood to ensure spotty electricity.

I like folding down corners of pages and used book sales and the little interaction I get from the disgruntled town librarian. I’m not ready to give that up yet.

Maybe an actual e-reader would help? But then I’m tied to a platform. Is there an open-source e-reader? Doubtful. And paying to have a platform to read books on? So strange. Maybe an e-reader will fall out of the sky. Maybe I should just get over my disgust of iPad reading and just go for it. Maybe maybe maybe. I don’t know.

I think I like paper just a little too much.

Hit page 1000 yesterday. Only 350 pages left to go!