Mini Book Reviews #3

I’m slaying my goodreads challenge, but not managing to write about many of the books I’ve read, so here are some mini reviews as I catch up!

Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse
(rounded down on goodreads)

With Black Sun, the first book in her fantasy trilogy set in a Pre-Columbian Americas inspired world, Roanhorse won me over with her complicated characters and strong worldbuilding. Fevered Star is the second book in the series but it suffers from a bad case of middle book syndrome. So much of this book feels like set up for the concluding volume; there’s a lot of moving characters from point A to point B, both physically and metaphorically and the result is a book with intricate, arguably overly, complicated political moves but stagnant character development.

In a book with multiple POVs there will often be perspectives that grab you more than others and that’s at work here. Serapio, the blind avatar of the crow god, is one of the more compelling perspectives, but Xiala, who I absolutely loved in Black Sun, is reduced to pining over Serapio for most of the book. I continue to love the casual queerness of this series (expressed through characters like Xiala, who has relationships with both men and women, and Iktan, a non-binary Priest of Knives who uses xe/xir pronouns) though, and I did enjoy the dynamic between Xiala and Iktan.

Fevered Star appears to be building to big things so fingers crossed Roanhorse can nail the conclusion next year!

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Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki 

More melancholic than its quirky premise might indicate, Light From Uncommon Stars is about self-discovery, human nature, and queer found family.

I absolutely loved the originality of concept here. As anyone who’s been following this blog for a while knows, I give points (or stars maybe?) for uniqueness and this one is up there! It features an alien who runs a donut shop with her family/crew and who falls in love with Shizuka Satomi, a shark of a teacher who sells her students’ souls to the devil in order to earn her own back. Meanwhile, Satomi is developing a bond with her seventh and final student sacrifice, transgender runaway Katrina.

Before picking this up I expected it to be one of my favourites of the year, and while I did enjoy this book, something was missing for me. Maybe it’s the too frequent shifts in perspective (often from paragraph to paragraph), maybe it’s that everything seemed to be wrapped up a little too conveniently at the end, or maybe it’s the tonal dissonance of telling a dark story in a whimsical way (a personal pet peeve of mine), but this book didn’t quite click for me.

I’ve seen Light From Uncommon Stars being recommended to fans of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, so I want to caution that this is a much darker book. Chambers’ books are often set in worlds of casual queerness, where differences are often accepted and celebrated. While there are also aliens and there is, eventually, acceptance, Light From Uncommon Stars is set firmly in a world like our own with all of the prejudices that entails. Katrina is a transgender runaway who has experienced domestic violence both at home and in her relationships, who engages in sex work to get by, and who experiences transphobic language and misgendering. As someone who went in expecting more of a feel good, cozy sci-fi vibe, this did take some getting used to. Still, it’s wonderful to see an Asian-American trans voice in science-fiction and I’m interested in seeing what Aoki will do next!

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The Magician by Colm Tóibín

It’s telling that not a single member of my book club could figure out why The Magician was written. Spanning more than 400 hardcover pages, The Magician is a fictionalized biography of acclaimed German author Thomas Mann and the contradictions of his public and personal lives. I’ll admit that having read this after reading one of Mann’s own books (Death in Venice), which I found underwhelming, and, unfortunately, the Wikipedia article that mentions Mann’s diary entries where he writes about being attracted to his adolescent son, my mind may have been clouded, but I at least expected Mann to be an intriguing figure, if not a particularly likeable one. I can’t find fault with Toibin’s solid prose, but Thomas Mann is the least interesting character in this book. He’s passive, reactive, and interior, none of which make for a person or character who you want to spend time with. Members of the book club I read this for agreed that we’d rather have read about multiple other Manns, including pragmatic spouse Katia, strong-willed daughter Erika, screw-up of a son Klaus, or daughter Monika (who survives a German submarine sinking the ship she’s travelling on!) before Thomas. Yet it’s Thomas’ story that Toibin inexplicably chooses to tell. Of more interest is the early-mid-twentieth century Germany setting, which is deftly described.

The Magician is only my second Toibin novel, after Brooklyn, which I also remember as an emotionally hollow read. I like Toibin’s writing style enough that I’m willing to try once more and see if three times really is the charm, but I’m starting to wonder if character development is not his strong suit.

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Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker
(rounded down on goodreads)

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City was recommended to me by a bookseller at my local SFF indie as part of a long and enthusiastic conversation about our shared love of Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, Katherine Addison’s exquisite worldbuilding, and the joys of Martha Wells’ Murderbot, so perhaps my expectations were just too high going into this one.

I think I expected a narrative that focused more on character and the daily lives of the ordinary people impacted by the siege, but K.J. Parker’s novel is more about engineering wizardry and the ingenuity of one man who tries to save his adopted home. I did, however, enjoy it. Sixteen Ways is an entertaining read and I was compelled to keep going and see how Orhan, a colonel of engineers more experienced in bridge-building than battles, would get himself out of each new scrape. Orhan’s unreliable first-person narration effectively guides us through the intricacies and politics of a Rome-like city and though I am emphatically not an engineer, I found the Roman-era technology interesting.

Ultimately I wish Parker had focused more on the characters, most of whom (besides Orhan) are shallowly developed. The women in particular exist almost entirely as love interests or relations to the male characters, which felt like lazy and regressive writing for a book that’s only a few years old.

Book Review: The Lost Apothecary

The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner
Published March 2, 2021

The Lost Apothecary has hooked readers (and the entertainment industry) with its gorgeous cover and intriguing concept – a female apothecary who secretly dispenses poisons to women who have been wronged by men – but the execution doesn’t live up to the promising pitch and it reads like the first novel it is.

It’s an unkind way to put it, I know, but when I read the author’s bio half-way through The Lost Apothecary I was not at all surprised to find that it was a debut novel by an author who lives in Florida and works full-time in finance.

Let’s start with the good though: This is one of the most gorgeous looking books out there. The cover is a thing of beauty so kudos to the art direction team for creating a book you want to pick up (there’s an informative video about the design process for this cover here). I also found the idea behind the book really interesting, especially its focus on women, and loved that it was set in 1790s London, a time period that appeals to me personally and isn’t as popular a setting for historical fiction.

Although the team behind The Lost Apothecary successfully created huge buzz for their book –my library system currently has 589 holds on it – I know I’m not the only one disappointed by the expectations vs. reality of this book. I went in expecting a historical thriller/mystery about misogyny and women helping women. What I got was more akin to the Da Vinci Code meets ‘women’s historical fiction’. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that subgenre, but it isn’t one that appeals to me and I wouldn’t have picked up The Lost Apothecary had I known that was what I was getting into.

The biggest problem with this book is the writing. I would love to see this concept and the marketing push behind it in the hands of literally any other writer, but debut novelist Sarah Penner has yet to find her voice and it undermines the story she’s trying to tell in every single way.

There are three POV characters: grizzled poisoner Nell and twelve-year-old would-be apprentice Eliza in the past and Caroline in the present. None of the characters have a distinct voice and they behave in similarly nonsensical ways, but the worst offender is Caroline. Caroline has just found out her husband is having an affair, which should beget instant sympathy but she’s one of the most annoying characters I’ve encountered in a long time. Unlike other history grads, apparently, she is more interested in primary documents than textbooks and has “unconventional interests”. She puts her entire life on hold for a guy and when she can’t find a job with her Social Sciences degree, she… blames the books and stops reading altogether??? Then, in a development I’d expect from a Marvel movie writer, not from a female novelist, Caroline becomes obsessed with getting pregnant – just one of the many female characters in this book to be consumed with thoughts about their womb and having children.

For someone who had been considering a career as a historian, Caroline frequently acts in ways that would make any practicing historian’s eyes roll permanently back into their head and yet the plot consistently rewards her inane behaviour as she jumps to conclusions.

As for Penner’s prose, it’s uninspired and often left me puzzled. Her descriptions veer towards the cliché, she overuses words and phrases, and has a tendency for melodrama. My mom wondered why Caroline was constantly trembling. I questioned why the character’s reaction to infidelity is to immediately throw up multiple times.

I wanted to like this book but Penner’s inexperience shows in the unbelievable plot, her overdramatic prose, and in one of the most insufferable protagonists I’ve ever encountered. I wish Ms. Penner the best of luck with her future writing but I hope she’ll work on improving her craft before publishing her next novel.

TL;DR: Interesting idea let down by poor execution, it reads like the first book it is. Also features one of the most insufferable protagonists of all time.

Book Review: The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library by Edward Wilson-Lee
Published March 12th 2019

In hindsight, the clue that I wasn’t going to enjoy this book was right there in the (sub)title.

When selecting The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books as my January pick for a Biographies! book club at work, I assumed that the focus would be mainly on Hernando Colón, Christopher Columbus’ illegitimate son, and his quest to collect and then organize books and material into a great library. At the time I thought nothing of the fact that this son, the man the biography is ostensibly about, isn’t even named in the subtitle. By the time I had tediously made my way through the first hundred pages (reading with a piece of paper covering the remaining text on the page so my mind and eyes couldn’t wander) about Columbus and his New World voyages, I bitterly regretted both my mistake and the fact that because I was reading this for work, I couldn’t DNF it.

The story of Hernando, his library, and how he undertook the process of organizing its contents is genuinely fascinating, but unfortunately this story makes up only a small fragment of Wilson-Lee’s bloated, meandering book. The rest covers Christopher Columbus, and Spain and its history in a way that only those who have personal experience with either the region or the manuscripts Hernando collected (which, remarkably, one member of the book club did!) will enjoy. I suspect that many others will DNF (as the two other members of the book club did), frustrated by the lifeless narrative, the dense text, and the lack of focus. Those who finish The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books will no doubt be left with a great deal of respect for Hernando Colón and his work, but sorely disappointed by the wasted potential that is this biography.

Fully the first third of Wilson-Lee’s book is focused on Columbus and, to a lesser degree, his relationship with his illegitimate son. Colón, who accompanied his father on many of his voyages, idolized his father and attempted to repair his tattered (yes, even in the sixteenth century) reputation. Yet even after Columbus’ death, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books reads like filler. It’s an exploration of place and time that goes far beyond what’s necessary to contextualize Hernando Colón’s life; more travelogue than biography. It’s also less than strictly factual, frequently using phrases like “perhaps he would have encountered” or “he may have seen” to discuss architecture and features of the towns and cities Colón visited.

I’ve also never before encountered a biography that told me less about its subject as a person. By all accounts Hernando Colón was an obsessive man, a workaholic consumed by his library and other projects (including a comprehensive Latin-English dictionary that never made it past the letter B, a description of the geographic makeup of Spain including distances and geographical features, and a biography of his father that neatly omits all of Columbus’ worst qualities), who had little in the way of a personal life. Yet the same accusation could be leveled at William Pitt the Younger and I would recommend William Hague’s informative and entertaining biography of Pitt to just about anyone, so I’m inclined to think the omission of any insight into Hernando Colón is a fault of the author.

Parts of The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books detailing how Hernando categorized his collection of prints so that he wouldn’t purchase duplicates, and describing his epitome, which summarized information contained in each manuscript with the purpose of disseminating not the books themselves but the summaries to the broader public are fascinating, but they occur late in the book and far too infrequently. As someone who doesn’t often pick up non-fiction, I may not be the target audience for this book, but as a librarian, I most certainly am. If even a librarian, the very geekily interested in the organization of information type of reader this book should appeal to the most, can barely get through the book, I’m not sure what hope anyone else has of finishing it!

Books: Fire Ant

Fire Ant by Jonathan P. Brazee
Published March 22, 2018

Fire Ant is both the last of my Nebula Award reads for this year and the least accomplished. It’s readable and there’s nothing glaringly wrong with it, but Fire Ant is your garden-variety military sci-fi tale of a plucky underdog who is selected to join an elite squad and must prove herself to her superiors and to her fellow pilots. Generic and predictable, Fire Ant is the novella equivalent of a popcorn movie; enjoyable enough while you’re reading/watching it (if you don’t think too hard, that is) but difficult to remember as soon as it’s over.

Floribeth “Beth” Dalisay is a member of the Off-Planet Worker underclass who has, by virtue of her 4″6 height, become a pilot for a mega-corporation that sends tiny one-person ships on missions of exploration. On a routine contract to search new solar systems for natural resources and/or habitable planets, Beth encounters a hostile alien presence who begin firing on her. Some fancy flying saves Beth’s life, but when she reports her encounter to the company, they ground her ship and impose financial penalties for equipment losses. Luckily the Directorate Navy is interested in Beth’s skillset and enlists her as a Navy fighter pilot.

I suspected Fire Ant wouldn’t be something I’d enjoy. There’s the rare exception (Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit is a clever, complicated, and well-characterized example of the genre), but military science-fiction (MilSF) holds very little appeal for me. Like many examples of its genre, Fire Ant offers an abundance of action, military procedure, and space battles, but is woefully short on characterization. By half-way through the novella I had started to skim, the extended training exercise descriptions and battle scenes making my eyes glaze over.

How, I wondered, does such a mediocre novella make it into an otherwise impressive slate of Nebula Award nominees? The answer seems to be through playing the voting system. A closed Facebook group of independent science-fiction and fantasy writers, including Brazee, put forward a list of authors with eligible works that they encouraged their members to vote for – and it worked! 6 of the works they suggested have been nominated for awards this year.

Undoubtedly a nomination will increase the visibility of a work, but I wonder if this approach doesn’t do as much harm as it does good. Sure I wouldn’t have picked up Fire Ant at all if it hadn’t been nominated for Best Novella, but when a work isn’t anywhere near the caliber of writing demonstrated by the other nominees in its category, it suffers by comparison.

Unfortunately, Fire Ant feels amateurish. Published under self-publishing imprint Semper Fi Press, I caught multiple spelling and grammar errors in Fire Ant that suggested it could use a more comprehensive edit. I don’t want to take away from anyone’s passion. I certainly haven’t written and published a book, so I have a great respect for those who follow their dreams and become a writer, but when you not only put your book out into the world, but then push to have it recognized by one of the most prestigious awards for science-fiction and fantasy authors, you open yourself up to criticism.

Books: The Raven Tower

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie
Published February 26, 2019

Ann Leckie’s fantasy debut is bound to be divisive. Those who write glowing five-star reviews will wax poetic about it’s experimental form, how unique it is in the genre, and the risks it takes. Those who are less enamored of The Raven Tower will critique its glacial pace and distracting second person tense that keep the reader at arm’s length from the characters. I belong to the latter group.

Let me begin by saying that I am a huge fan of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy. Not only are they among my favourite books of all-time, I believe they are modern science-fiction classics that every lover of genre fiction should read. As someone who tends to prefer fantasy to sci-fi, I expected to be gushing about Leckie’s first foray into fantasy so The Raven Tower was a bitter disappointment. Glowing critical reviews and a 4.06 rating on goodreads indicate that I may just have been the wrong reader for this book, but I found it to be a dull slog with minimal pay-off.

The Raven Tower is narrated by a passive and largely apathetic ancient god, known as The Strength and Patience of the Hill, content to live out the rest of its days without fame, friends, or even a change of scenery. Sticking to its first form – literally a large rock on a hill – it’s pretty much the most boring god ever. Here’s where it gets really frustrating (or maybe not if you like this sort of thing); the narration is often in second person, with the “you” addressing not the reader but the only likable character in the entire novel, Eolo. The most boring of rock gods observes and reports on Eolo, who has his hands full acting as Aide to whiny Prince Marwan (think Hamlet, only instead of emo and kind of a dick, Marwan is filled with rage and kind of a dick). Eventually Eolo meets The Strength and Patience of the Hill and things pick up, but by this point, lacking the patience of an ancient god, I just didn’t care anymore.

Part of the problem here is the form that the narration takes. Theoretically the idea of telling a story of human civilization over time from the perspective of a passive observer is intriguing. Letting the narration digress into philosophical musings and pacing the story to fit the narrator’s patient disregard for the passage of time sounds genius, but it just doesn’t make for an enjoyable read.

For one thing, humans have much shorter attention spans, especially in this age of constant stimulation, than an ancient god and, quite frankly, many of us have TBRs we’d have to be immortal to get through. There is very little incentive to read a book that moves about as quickly and with as many plot developments as paint drying.

The other major issue with choosing a narrator who rarely interacts with the characters is that it keeps the reader at arm’s length and prevents us from connecting with anyone in the story. The second person tense places the reader in Eolo’s shoes, but in doing so we don’t actually get much of a glimpse into his thoughts and feelings and where he’s coming from. There’s also a lot more telling than showing. Eolo tells us that the Prince he serves so faithfully, Marwan, is a good person, but there’s never any evidence of that presented on the page so how can we trust this statement?

The plot of The Raven Tower is largely politicking – a usurper has taken over the position of Lease (sort of like a King, but the position requires a blood sacrifice to a Raven god) and the old Lease has disappeared. But politicking only works if we have a vested interest in one side. I didn’t care about any of the characters enough to care about who wins and loses, or if the civilization remains or is defeated.

There are some things about this book that I appreciated. Eolo is an interesting, though sadly under-developed, character and the fact that he is transgendered is terrific representation to see in a medieval-era inspired fantasy novel. As someone interested in both mythology and anthropology, I found some of the passages exploring a civilization’s growth and change over time and its relationship with gods intriguing. I also have a certain amount of respect for an author who tries something completely new and breaks away from her previous work, as Leckie has done here. It just didn’t work for me personally.

Ultimately The Raven Tower is an experimental, meandering look at human civilizations over time and their relationship with religion. It’s an interesting premise, but one that would have been better served by a novella or work of short fiction than a poorly-paced 400 page novel.

Books: Warlight

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
Published June 7, 2018

Warlight is the rare case of a book where I can sum up my experience reading it in a single word. Unfortunately, that word is tedious. There’s no question that Ondaatje can write, but missing from Warlight are character development, an engaging plot, and any sense of tension or conflict. I love eloquent prose, I do, but my primary draws to a book are definitely characters and then plot, so Ondaatje was never going to reel me in with this effort, which is so lacking in both.

Reading Warlight on the heels of John Boyne’s latest, A Ladder to the Sky, I couldn’t help but laugh because the problems I had with Warlight are exactly the ones faced by Boyne’s aspiring author character Maurice. Warlight demonstrates Ondaatje’s talent for prose – it’s poetic, elegant, and a little dreamy – but the story itself is boring. Ostensibly it’s intended as a bildungsroman, where protagonist Nathaniel tries to piece together the truth about his mother after her death through revisiting memories of his unusual childhood in post-war London, but Nathaniel never grows or changes as a result of his experiences so the coming-of-age story falls flat.

This lack of emotional depth or interest extends to the other major and minor characters in the novel. Although characters are associated with intelligence organizations, or have eccentric hobbies and interests, they’re all frankly rather dull. I never connected with Nathaniel and Rachel, their absent mother, or the odd lodgers in their childhood home, or found their relationships engaging. It’s just never clear what Ondaatje is trying to accomplish with this book or why the reader should care.

I picked up Warlight on something of a whim. It was on the Best Bets shelf of my local library, it had been named to the Man Booker longlist, and I’d never read any fiction by Ondaatje before (I read his memoir, Running in the Family, in University) and felt a certain imperative to give such a lauded Canadian author a try. Although my experience was disappointing, I have to echo Rachel’s sentiment about starting with the wrong book. I didn’t get any sense from Warlight of what Michael Ondaatje is capable of and with such an illustrious author I’m sure the answer must be more than this passionless, plodding novel. A few fellow Canadians have recommended In the Skin of a Lion, a book partially set in the city of Toronto, so when I’m prepared to give Ondaatje a second chance, I’ll probably start there.

Books: Treasure Island

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
first published January 28, 1882

After visiting the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh, it seemed only natural that I should continue my challenge to read more classics with one of the best loved Scottish authors. Let’s be honest though, the main reason why I chose Treasure Island is because my favourite television show, Black Sails, acts as a loose prequel to the events of Stevenson’s adventure story.

In the novel, Jim Hawkins discovers a map among the effects of an old sailor, who dies while staying at the Hawkins’ family inn. Deducing that the map leads to the location where the infamous pirate Captain Flint buried his treasure, the local physician and district squire buy a ship, gather a crew, and set sail. However, the crew turn out to be former pirates from Flint’s crew and plot a mutiny against the honest men.

Sounds interesting right? Wrong! No book about pirates written for children should be this dull! I can understand why Treasure Island would capture the imagination of readers in the nineteenth century but this is one classic that the years have not treated kindly. Never before has 187 pages felt so long!

The biggest problem is that Treasure Island is written in over-descriptive prose that robs the narrative of any sense of urgency or tension. The stakes are never high enough to feel as though there’s any real danger, and the dialogue is filled with nautical slang to the point where it’s difficult to understand what the characters are actually saying.

With the possible exception of Jim Hawkins, the boy narrator, the characters are thinly written. The most enduring character is, understandably, Silver, who shows some promise in his jovial persona but underlying self-interest. Silver unfortunately doesn’t have a large enough role to save this novel though.  It’s easy to see why Treasure Island has been adapted successfully, but the source material does not stand the test of time. It’s particularly distressing that Treasure Island is recommended to pre-teen and teenage boys, who are often among the most reluctant readers.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s influence on the depiction of pirates in pop culture cannot be underestimated. Treasure Island created many pirate tropes including X marks the spot, Long John Silver with his parrot, and nautical slang. These have been cemented in our minds through its various adaptations from more traditional films to new classics like Muppet Treasure Island. This contribution to pirate lore is Treasure Island‘s legacy. Stevenson has created a foundation on which more in-depth and engaging pirate stories can grow for future generations. My advice? Leave Treasure Island on the shelf and enjoy the media it’s inspired instead.

Books: War and Peace

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
originally published in 1868
translated by Anthony Briggs

Reviewing a book as celebrated as War and Peace is no easy feat, especially when you’re going against the crowd, so let me emphasis that this is not an objective review of War and Peace or where it stands in the annals of literature, but a summary of what I thought of the book. In short, as much as I wanted to like War and Peace, and even thought that I would based on the first 700 or so pages, I found the second half to be a tedious slog that focused increasingly on detailed descriptions of the Napoleonic Wars while the characters took a backseat.

I decided to tackle War and Peace for a few reasons. One, a few friends (Hadeer and Rachel, who both finished before me and have posted reviews on their blogs) were doing a group read and it seemed like the kind of project book that could use a support system. Two, I had recently seen and loved Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, a musical based on the 70-page excerpt of War and Peace that focuses on Natasha’s affair with Anatole Kuragin. Since the excerpt is drawn from the middle of the book, I was left with questions about how these characters came to be in their situations, and what happened to them after the musical ended. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was that the characters in the book only ever felt surface-deep.

Part of my frustration stems from the fact that the novel is extremely unbalanced. The first half of the book is undoubtedly stronger as Tolstoy’s early war passages contain both a wry sense of humour and commentary on how young men romanticize the war and the emperor. These are balanced with engaging peace scenes that develop the characters, from poor bewildered Pierre to selfless Sonya and spirited Natasha. By the time Tolstoy hits the midpoint he seems to abandon all pretense that he’s writing a novel though and focus decidedly on the war.

As the only other nineteenth-century, brick-sized epic I’ve read, I couldn’t help but compare and contrast War and Peace with Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Unfortunately, War and Peace comes out poorer for the comparison in every way.

Although the characters in Les Misérables are archetypal (Fantine as The Fallen Woman, for example), they’re given such depth and empathy that you can’t help but feel for them. I liked Tolstoy’s characters initially, but it’s difficult to form a connection or to feel like you know people who barely seem to know themselves. As a commentary on society, creating characters who are so mutable that their minds, romantic attachments, and entire worldviews shift in an instant if someone voices a dissenting opinion, is interesting. In practice it makes for characters who are hard to understand and care about.

You’ll hear no argument from me that both of these books could have used a more disciplined editor, but Hugo’s digressions, tangents on The Battle of Waterloo, the Paris sewer system, and argot, among others, are somewhat interesting and, much like a distracted university professor, he gets back to his original thought. In War and Peace, it feels like the characters and any semblance of plot are the digression. Tolstoy rhapsodizes about the war and presents his detailed thoughts on the Great Man Theory and every hundred pages or so someone reminds him that there are characters besides Napoleon and the soldiers and Tolstoy grudgingly gives the reader a hasty interlude before he returns to writing passionately about the war. Sadly, this is true even of the epilogue. Tolstoy presents twenty or so pages of domesticity to sum up the characters’ lives, but the remainder of the hundred pages reads more like the conclusion to a dissertation than an epilogue. For those with a keen interest in military history I imagine this makes for a fascinating read. As someone who reads for characters above all else, I found this immensely frustrating.

At the end of Les Misérables I felt a great swell of emotion and love for these characters who had become so dear. When I finished War and Peace I mostly just felt relieved that it was over.

For all my negativity, I’m not sorry I read War and Peace and it hasn’t entirely put me off Tolstoy. At some point (many moons from now, I need a break!) I’ll probably still read Anna Karenina, and hope that it touches me more than War and Peace. However, I can’t imagine ever wanting to read War and Peace again and I think it offers more from a military history perspective than it does from a story standpoint.

Should you attempt the behemoth and read War and Peace? If you have a great love of military history then yes, this might just be the book for you. If not, do yourself a favour and choose another nineteenth century epic, I’d suggest Hugo’s Les Miserables, instead.