Hello everyone, I'm Gretchen Rubin from New York City and Kansas City in the United States. My sister Elizabeth and I, and our husbands, decided to join because our mother did it last year and enjoyed it so much that she's doing it again. We talked about the Slow Read on our "Happier with Gretchen Rubin" podcast, as part of our challenge to read 25 minutes each day in 2025. I'm so looking forward to this daily read with this community. More reading for all in 2025! Many thanks to Simon for creating this framework.
Thank you Gretchen! Or rather, thank you to your mom! – without whom so many people here wouldn't have heard about Footnotes and Tangents. Delighted to welcome all of you here.
I joined after hearing about it on your podcast. Then, I got 4 or 5 friends to join, too. Fun! (We read Les Miserables together two years ago--a great experience.)
Hi everyone, I am from New Brunswick Canada and have also heard about this slow read from the Happier podcast while committing to the read 25 minutes in 2025. I have always been curious about War and Peace but have yet to take the plunge. My husband and I will be doing it together and we are looking forward to diving in to this classic tomorrow!
Hi! I live in Miami, FL and I too heard about this from the Happier podcast. I have been looking for a project that engages me daily, this seemed like the perfect fit!
Hi fellow readers. I’m Leslie Leven from Maryland, a writer and reader. I am thrilled to say today is the third day of my commitment to myself, to Simon and so many others. What an adventure we’re headed toward in Tolstoy’s world. I read Anna Karenina twice and the marvelous short stories, but War and Peace was the dessert I put off for too long. I’ve told my spouse that if I expire before him, he must promise to put W&P in my coffin because who knows whether I’ll have time to read it on the way to wherever I am bound. But no longer that dream! I’m planning on savoring it long before the “end” comes. Thank you, Simon, for offering this opportunity and being our expert tour guide…
As a member of the Simple Scrapper and Modern Mrs Darcy communities, where we spend a great quantity of time enjoying your works, and a fellow Footnotes and Tangents lover, I’m so glad to see you here, and wish you well on your W&P journey. The chat is so rich and contributes so much to the process, and Simon is a treasure :)
As soon as I heard you talk about this on your podcast I was instantly IN. I don’t know why it was so appealing, maybe my inner student was craving this’
Hello everyone! Greetings from the Connecticut shoreline! I’m happy to be here. I’m grateful to Gretchen Rubin and her podcast for lifting up this 2025 reading experience. Looking forward to spending the year with all here.
Hello, Gretchen and Elizabeth! I joined because my wife told me you were doing it. I'm so glad I decided to do this. I invited my mom to do it with us. Thanks for recommending and joining!!!
Hello fellow readers, I’m Stephanie from a small town in Texas. I am a high school English teacher and unapologetically passionate about literacy and access for all to the reading experience. Reading is my main hobby and I love helping others through book recommendations. I would say fate led me to this slow read because I heard about it on a podcast that I listen to off and on but not on a regular basis. I actually stopped getting ready for work and signed up immediately. I say fate because I had been feeling like I needed a little extra something in my reading life. Books clubs are great but all of the ones I have been part of are more social than book, which is fun, but I love analyzing and connecting through reading. So, this slow read seemed to come at just the right time. I have never read War and Peace (or Tolstoy), so I am immensely excited about this experience.
Kathy in Anacortes, Washington State in the San Juan Islands. I can see Canada (but not all the way to Yellowknife) from here. I read Crime and Punishment last year with Dana’s substack group and I was so ridiculously proud of this accomplishment I thought which mountain shall I climb next? Why not Mt. Everest: War and Peace? i have my ice picks and oxygen tanks and ready to go.
Hi Kathy! I lived in and around Seattle for two years a few years ago and one of my closest friends still lives on Lopez Island. It’s absolutely beautiful where you are, though not much light this time of year. Sending you and the land a hug from the east coast!
Hi everyone, I'm Jane from deepest rural Norfolk, England. I'm participating in both the W&P and Wolf Crawl slow reads for the first time in 2025 and I'm really looking forward to the immersive experience. Santa bought me a beautiful cloth-bound Penguin edition of W&P for Christmas which is currently in pristine condition - by the end of the year I hope it'll be well-annotated and full of exclamations of wonder and delight. I've read the Cromwell trilogy already (and loved it!) but thought I'd tackle W&P because many of my all-time favourite books were written by many of Tolstoy's British contemporaries (Eliot, Dickens, Hardy) or his British antecedents (Austen, Defoe, Swift, Johnson), but apart from Dostoevsky I've shamefully neglected most 19th century non-British literature. Big gaps where there ought to be knowledge of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Pushkin, Flaubert, Stendhal, Zola, Hugo etc., so I thought I'd better make a start. My 2025 reading plan also includes reading Dante's Divine Comedy in the original Italian (one canto a day for 100 days), so this will be an interesting reading year. I look forward to getting to know my fellow slow-readers better over the next 12 months.
I want to read the Divine Comedy this year, too! I may not be able to fully appreciate the Italian, but I studied Latin for 3 years and Spanish for 7 (I'm conversationally bilingual but not fluent), and I can read basic contemporary Italian but struggle with abstract and older language. Might read it in English first. But if you feel like chatting about the DC as well as W&P, let's be friends!
Hope, if you want to read the DC in English first, a good place to start is with the daily emails from the 100 Days of Dante project: https://100daysofdante.com/
It's a wonderful way to read the DC slowly in English, and hopefully it'll give you the confidence to tackle it afterwards in the original, beautiful Italian.
For the past 20 years, I’ve been in a book club with a paid leader who is a PhD English professor. We met in person, then via Zoom during the pandemic, and for various reasons, our last meeting was in October. That provided the impetus for me to find a War and Peace reading group. I bought the Pevear edition when it first came out in 2008, because the translation received excellent reviews, and the book has been staring at me from my bookshelf ever since.
War and Peace has been on my to-do list, mostly because I felt I should read it, since it always makes the best books of all times lists, and because I’m curious to know why. I’m not a huge fan of Russian literature, but I recently listened to A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders, which I highly recommend. (I prefer reading to audio books, but I listened to this on my daily walks.)
I like the structure of this reading group, because it allows time to read other books. In book club, we typically read serious literature, which is often depressing. These days, given the state of the world, I’m limiting the amount of depressing books and movies I consume. There is one book we read this year that I would recommend: The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (not depressing). And for a heavy dose of humanity, read The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride.
I look forward to reading War and Peace with all of you. Best wishes for a happy and health New Year.
Hey Andrea! I loved all three of Tan Twan Eng's books! Glad you found us. The great thing about War and Peace is that it is quite a hopeful (and funny) book - which is quite a surprise given the reputation of Russian Literature. I also loved George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain - it has made me want to read more Russian writers and more short stories.
My name is Charlene and I am from Yellowknife, NWT, Canada. I came to this read along from Gretchen’s podcast. I signed up right away as I have been meaning to read some of the Russian classics for some time. I actually was discussing this with coworkers right before I went on Christmas break. I’m a geologist and a recent widow. I live off grid here in the subarctic and look forward to tackling this book with a group and in a way that feels quite manageable.
Hello from Fish Creek, at the southern-most tip of mainland Australia. I’m looking forward to my first journey through War and Peace. For too long I’ve been put off reading it by its size and a worry that I’d be missing out on reading too many other books, as I find I can read only one piece of fiction at a time. At my age, it’s now or never, and Simon’s proposal for a slow read of just a chapter a day suggests I can have the best of both worlds: Tolstoy plus others. This, and the added bonus of a reading community! Thanks, and see you in the chat.
Hello everyone, I'm Michael from Toronto, Canada. I discovered Simon's War & Peace slow read early in 2024 by way of my mother, who participated this past year. Having inherited her love of reading, I was quickly intrigued both by the concept of the slow read, as well as the idea of working my way through such an iconic piece of literature that I have long found to be interesting but daunting. I think I made up my mind in March that I would have to participate if Simon ran the slow read again in 2025! I have been counting the days until January 1st, when we all shall embark on Tolstoy's grand adventure together.
I'm Robert from Philadelphia. I have been trying to rebuild my book reading regimen for a few years now. About two years ago, I started to read War & Peace and got 400 pages in and then fell victim to the pull of internet reading. I actually loved the book as far as I got. Was shocked at how funny it was and entranced by Tolstoy's ability to write about seemingly every shade of human emotion and every nuance of life. Anyway, I learned of this group, and thought hey, reading a chapter a day for a year is just what I need to restore my book reading habit and book reading muscles.
I'm excited. Oh, and I will start from the beginning like everyone else.
Hey Robert. Sounds like you are here for all the right reasons! And yes to W&P being both funny and perceptive of all human emotion and life. I hope this read-along restores your reading habit!
Fellow travelers, I'm a cranky old guy living in Bemidji, Minnesota ,(which is about as cold as Russia) and San Francisco which has plenty of Russians. For the past couple of years I've been reading about the misery of other people's ancestors, which means Eastern Europe; Second Hand Time by Sevetlana Alexievich deserves mention. War and Peace was referenced by commentators while I was reading Life and Fate --Vassily Grossman---sooo given my need to escape current reality in the US , War and Peace presented itself as the answer. May we all know who is who and whom is talking with whom, and what is and what-not as we face the coming year's slow read. Tom
Hi, I’m Julie and I live in the Seattle area. I joined this slow read because I read War and Peace in a humanities course in college a long time ago, and I remember almost nothing about it except the names of the main characters. I still can’t believe that I read the whole book in a ten-week academic quarter! I’m looking forward to reading and savoring the book slowly, and experiencing it as a grown-up adult this time.
Hello everyone, I'm Alaina. I live in Washington state in the USA, where I work as a veterinarian and homeschool my children. My husband and I are both doing the slow read this year; we each picked the translation we were most interested in, got it for one another, wrapped it up, and put it under the tree. Cheesy? Yes, but it helped build the excitement. My favorite genre of fiction is the multigenerational family saga: standouts from my reading history include East of Eden, Pachinko, and The Covenant of Water. As a person with many proverbial plates spinning all the time, I am intrigued by the slow-read model of interacting with a book, and can't wait to dive in!
Hello! I’m Izzy and I joined because I love reading, I love collecting books, but I have a really hard time choosing what to read and when. Something will hold my attention for a few days or a week, then I’ll move on. I also struggle to allow time for reading, even though I love it. I would never ever contemplate reading something like W&P if it wasn’t for (a) this supported read-along (b) having it pointed out that the chapters are very short, only a couple to four pages at most. This I can do. I also know that after a few pages, I’ll slip into ‘reading mode’ and be tempted to keep going, so a forced stop at the end of the day’s chapter will help keep momentum high: hopefully I’ll be itching to get back to it the next day and carry on (c) I love the fact there’s approximately a chapter a day for a year - that’s so perfect, it’d be rude not to give this a shot (d) my bedside table is currently MIA under three teetering piles of books, all part-read. I’m feeling the need to clear the lot, leaving space for just one - this one. That would be the logical double solution to clutter and the “what to read” question. However, I’m also tempted to do my reading first thing in the morning after my Duolingo German practice - I’m 800 days in, and it’s become a habit. I could habit-stack by adding my W&P read, and have the whole day ahead of me to let it soak in, and partake in the chat threads. And reading at night makes me sleepy anyway, so most of my reading time is spent re-reading - hence many unfinished books littering the bedside. Decisions!! It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out and what sort of rhythm and routine I settle into as the year progresses. I’m looking forward to starting!
Hi everyone! My name is Jen Jacobsen and I work in college health in Minnesota (northern U.S.). While I was a history major in college, I ended up with a Russian and Eastern European (as we called it in the 90’s) concentration, mostly because I fell in love with Russian literature in translation. Tolstoy was my favorite course. While I have reread Anna Karenina a number of times, War & Peace has been too daunting to go back to in the absence of a reading community. One of my college friends invited me to join this group and I am delighted to be here!
Hello everyone. What a huge and international group we are! My name is Sharon and I’m from the UK. I live in Leicestershire, aka “the heart of rural England”. I have just finished Simon’s year-long slow read of the Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel and can honestly say it was the best, most interesting and personally transformative thing I have done in ages. It’s reshaped my relationship with reading. So no surprise that I’m excited for War and Peace. Festive greetings to everyone!
So glad to hear of the transformative experience of reading the Wolf Hall trilogy. I thought of getting "greedy" and doing Wolf Hall AND War and Peace in 2025. Then practical sense asserted itself. I want to go through War and Peace and then perhaps Wolfe Hall next year. Thanks for your comments on how wonderful that project was.
I am retired and live in Columbus, Ohio, USA. A friend who knows I’m a fan of War and Peace and the Cromwell Trilogy let me know about footnotes & tangents. This will be my fourth or fifth time reading War and Peace, but the first time in the company of a reading group.
I’m a lifelong reader. In college I was a history major, but I took more hours in English so I could have something entertaining and interesting to read.
Hello everyone, I'm Gretchen Rubin from New York City and Kansas City in the United States. My sister Elizabeth and I, and our husbands, decided to join because our mother did it last year and enjoyed it so much that she's doing it again. We talked about the Slow Read on our "Happier with Gretchen Rubin" podcast, as part of our challenge to read 25 minutes each day in 2025. I'm so looking forward to this daily read with this community. More reading for all in 2025! Many thanks to Simon for creating this framework.
Thank you Gretchen! Or rather, thank you to your mom! – without whom so many people here wouldn't have heard about Footnotes and Tangents. Delighted to welcome all of you here.
I'm so happy that we were able to share our enthusiasm so that more people know about this terrific undertaking! can't wait for January 1.
I am so happy that you featured this in your podcast . This “Slow Read” is something I look forward to in 2025
I joined after hearing about it on your podcast. Then, I got 4 or 5 friends to join, too. Fun! (We read Les Miserables together two years ago--a great experience.)
Thanks for sharing Gretchen! I’m looking forward to it!
Hi everyone, I am from New Brunswick Canada and have also heard about this slow read from the Happier podcast while committing to the read 25 minutes in 2025. I have always been curious about War and Peace but have yet to take the plunge. My husband and I will be doing it together and we are looking forward to diving in to this classic tomorrow!
Hi! I live in Miami, FL and I too heard about this from the Happier podcast. I have been looking for a project that engages me daily, this seemed like the perfect fit!
Hi fellow readers. I’m Leslie Leven from Maryland, a writer and reader. I am thrilled to say today is the third day of my commitment to myself, to Simon and so many others. What an adventure we’re headed toward in Tolstoy’s world. I read Anna Karenina twice and the marvelous short stories, but War and Peace was the dessert I put off for too long. I’ve told my spouse that if I expire before him, he must promise to put W&P in my coffin because who knows whether I’ll have time to read it on the way to wherever I am bound. But no longer that dream! I’m planning on savoring it long before the “end” comes. Thank you, Simon, for offering this opportunity and being our expert tour guide…
As a member of the Simple Scrapper and Modern Mrs Darcy communities, where we spend a great quantity of time enjoying your works, and a fellow Footnotes and Tangents lover, I’m so glad to see you here, and wish you well on your W&P journey. The chat is so rich and contributes so much to the process, and Simon is a treasure :)
Also an MMD Member! Hello from Cali, Colombia.
Hello hello!
Also a member of MMD!!
Thank you Gretchen - I’m here because of your Happier podcast - also busy writing my 25 in 25 list at the moment - and my ‘one word theme’
As soon as I heard you talk about this on your podcast I was instantly IN. I don’t know why it was so appealing, maybe my inner student was craving this’
HI’m Gretchen, I am a super-fan and long time listener of your podcast ( since 2014). I am here thanks to you!
Me too!
Hi Gretchen! I’m a listener and you inspired me to join this years slow read 😁
Hello everyone! Greetings from the Connecticut shoreline! I’m happy to be here. I’m grateful to Gretchen Rubin and her podcast for lifting up this 2025 reading experience. Looking forward to spending the year with all here.
Thanks for yet another great idea, @GretchenRubin !
Thanks to you and Elizabeth for highlighting this opportunity... I'm so glad to have heard about it and be able to participate!
Hello, Gretchen and Elizabeth! I joined because my wife told me you were doing it. I'm so glad I decided to do this. I invited my mom to do it with us. Thanks for recommending and joining!!!
Hello fellow readers, I’m Stephanie from a small town in Texas. I am a high school English teacher and unapologetically passionate about literacy and access for all to the reading experience. Reading is my main hobby and I love helping others through book recommendations. I would say fate led me to this slow read because I heard about it on a podcast that I listen to off and on but not on a regular basis. I actually stopped getting ready for work and signed up immediately. I say fate because I had been feeling like I needed a little extra something in my reading life. Books clubs are great but all of the ones I have been part of are more social than book, which is fun, but I love analyzing and connecting through reading. So, this slow read seemed to come at just the right time. I have never read War and Peace (or Tolstoy), so I am immensely excited about this experience.
Welcome, Stephanie! Love your passion for literacy and making reading accessible to all!
Kathy in Anacortes, Washington State in the San Juan Islands. I can see Canada (but not all the way to Yellowknife) from here. I read Crime and Punishment last year with Dana’s substack group and I was so ridiculously proud of this accomplishment I thought which mountain shall I climb next? Why not Mt. Everest: War and Peace? i have my ice picks and oxygen tanks and ready to go.
Hi Kathy! I lived in and around Seattle for two years a few years ago and one of my closest friends still lives on Lopez Island. It’s absolutely beautiful where you are, though not much light this time of year. Sending you and the land a hug from the east coast!
Hi everyone, I'm Jane from deepest rural Norfolk, England. I'm participating in both the W&P and Wolf Crawl slow reads for the first time in 2025 and I'm really looking forward to the immersive experience. Santa bought me a beautiful cloth-bound Penguin edition of W&P for Christmas which is currently in pristine condition - by the end of the year I hope it'll be well-annotated and full of exclamations of wonder and delight. I've read the Cromwell trilogy already (and loved it!) but thought I'd tackle W&P because many of my all-time favourite books were written by many of Tolstoy's British contemporaries (Eliot, Dickens, Hardy) or his British antecedents (Austen, Defoe, Swift, Johnson), but apart from Dostoevsky I've shamefully neglected most 19th century non-British literature. Big gaps where there ought to be knowledge of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Pushkin, Flaubert, Stendhal, Zola, Hugo etc., so I thought I'd better make a start. My 2025 reading plan also includes reading Dante's Divine Comedy in the original Italian (one canto a day for 100 days), so this will be an interesting reading year. I look forward to getting to know my fellow slow-readers better over the next 12 months.
I want to read the Divine Comedy this year, too! I may not be able to fully appreciate the Italian, but I studied Latin for 3 years and Spanish for 7 (I'm conversationally bilingual but not fluent), and I can read basic contemporary Italian but struggle with abstract and older language. Might read it in English first. But if you feel like chatting about the DC as well as W&P, let's be friends!
Check out Genius & Ink, which is doing a read along of The Divine Comedy all next year: https://open.substack.com/pub/armenikus/p/join-the-2025-dantes-the-divine-comedy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5c06v
Oh wonderful! Exciting!
Hope, if you want to read the DC in English first, a good place to start is with the daily emails from the 100 Days of Dante project: https://100daysofdante.com/
It's a wonderful way to read the DC slowly in English, and hopefully it'll give you the confidence to tackle it afterwards in the original, beautiful Italian.
This is perfect thank you
Welcome, Jane!
Hi Everyone,
I’m a freelance editor and writer, living in NYC.
For the past 20 years, I’ve been in a book club with a paid leader who is a PhD English professor. We met in person, then via Zoom during the pandemic, and for various reasons, our last meeting was in October. That provided the impetus for me to find a War and Peace reading group. I bought the Pevear edition when it first came out in 2008, because the translation received excellent reviews, and the book has been staring at me from my bookshelf ever since.
War and Peace has been on my to-do list, mostly because I felt I should read it, since it always makes the best books of all times lists, and because I’m curious to know why. I’m not a huge fan of Russian literature, but I recently listened to A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders, which I highly recommend. (I prefer reading to audio books, but I listened to this on my daily walks.)
I like the structure of this reading group, because it allows time to read other books. In book club, we typically read serious literature, which is often depressing. These days, given the state of the world, I’m limiting the amount of depressing books and movies I consume. There is one book we read this year that I would recommend: The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (not depressing). And for a heavy dose of humanity, read The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride.
I look forward to reading War and Peace with all of you. Best wishes for a happy and health New Year.
Hey Andrea! I loved all three of Tan Twan Eng's books! Glad you found us. The great thing about War and Peace is that it is quite a hopeful (and funny) book - which is quite a surprise given the reputation of Russian Literature. I also loved George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain - it has made me want to read more Russian writers and more short stories.
Hello Everyone,
My name is Charlene and I am from Yellowknife, NWT, Canada. I came to this read along from Gretchen’s podcast. I signed up right away as I have been meaning to read some of the Russian classics for some time. I actually was discussing this with coworkers right before I went on Christmas break. I’m a geologist and a recent widow. I live off grid here in the subarctic and look forward to tackling this book with a group and in a way that feels quite manageable.
Hello from Fish Creek, at the southern-most tip of mainland Australia. I’m looking forward to my first journey through War and Peace. For too long I’ve been put off reading it by its size and a worry that I’d be missing out on reading too many other books, as I find I can read only one piece of fiction at a time. At my age, it’s now or never, and Simon’s proposal for a slow read of just a chapter a day suggests I can have the best of both worlds: Tolstoy plus others. This, and the added bonus of a reading community! Thanks, and see you in the chat.
Welcome, Tony. This is definitely doable at a gentle pace with great company.
Hello everyone, I'm Michael from Toronto, Canada. I discovered Simon's War & Peace slow read early in 2024 by way of my mother, who participated this past year. Having inherited her love of reading, I was quickly intrigued both by the concept of the slow read, as well as the idea of working my way through such an iconic piece of literature that I have long found to be interesting but daunting. I think I made up my mind in March that I would have to participate if Simon ran the slow read again in 2025! I have been counting the days until January 1st, when we all shall embark on Tolstoy's grand adventure together.
I'm Robert from Philadelphia. I have been trying to rebuild my book reading regimen for a few years now. About two years ago, I started to read War & Peace and got 400 pages in and then fell victim to the pull of internet reading. I actually loved the book as far as I got. Was shocked at how funny it was and entranced by Tolstoy's ability to write about seemingly every shade of human emotion and every nuance of life. Anyway, I learned of this group, and thought hey, reading a chapter a day for a year is just what I need to restore my book reading habit and book reading muscles.
I'm excited. Oh, and I will start from the beginning like everyone else.
Hey Robert. Sounds like you are here for all the right reasons! And yes to W&P being both funny and perceptive of all human emotion and life. I hope this read-along restores your reading habit!
Fellow travelers, I'm a cranky old guy living in Bemidji, Minnesota ,(which is about as cold as Russia) and San Francisco which has plenty of Russians. For the past couple of years I've been reading about the misery of other people's ancestors, which means Eastern Europe; Second Hand Time by Sevetlana Alexievich deserves mention. War and Peace was referenced by commentators while I was reading Life and Fate --Vassily Grossman---sooo given my need to escape current reality in the US , War and Peace presented itself as the answer. May we all know who is who and whom is talking with whom, and what is and what-not as we face the coming year's slow read. Tom
Hi, I’m Julie and I live in the Seattle area. I joined this slow read because I read War and Peace in a humanities course in college a long time ago, and I remember almost nothing about it except the names of the main characters. I still can’t believe that I read the whole book in a ten-week academic quarter! I’m looking forward to reading and savoring the book slowly, and experiencing it as a grown-up adult this time.
Another Julie! Yay!
Hello everyone, I'm Alaina. I live in Washington state in the USA, where I work as a veterinarian and homeschool my children. My husband and I are both doing the slow read this year; we each picked the translation we were most interested in, got it for one another, wrapped it up, and put it under the tree. Cheesy? Yes, but it helped build the excitement. My favorite genre of fiction is the multigenerational family saga: standouts from my reading history include East of Eden, Pachinko, and The Covenant of Water. As a person with many proverbial plates spinning all the time, I am intrigued by the slow-read model of interacting with a book, and can't wait to dive in!
Hello! I’m Izzy and I joined because I love reading, I love collecting books, but I have a really hard time choosing what to read and when. Something will hold my attention for a few days or a week, then I’ll move on. I also struggle to allow time for reading, even though I love it. I would never ever contemplate reading something like W&P if it wasn’t for (a) this supported read-along (b) having it pointed out that the chapters are very short, only a couple to four pages at most. This I can do. I also know that after a few pages, I’ll slip into ‘reading mode’ and be tempted to keep going, so a forced stop at the end of the day’s chapter will help keep momentum high: hopefully I’ll be itching to get back to it the next day and carry on (c) I love the fact there’s approximately a chapter a day for a year - that’s so perfect, it’d be rude not to give this a shot (d) my bedside table is currently MIA under three teetering piles of books, all part-read. I’m feeling the need to clear the lot, leaving space for just one - this one. That would be the logical double solution to clutter and the “what to read” question. However, I’m also tempted to do my reading first thing in the morning after my Duolingo German practice - I’m 800 days in, and it’s become a habit. I could habit-stack by adding my W&P read, and have the whole day ahead of me to let it soak in, and partake in the chat threads. And reading at night makes me sleepy anyway, so most of my reading time is spent re-reading - hence many unfinished books littering the bedside. Decisions!! It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out and what sort of rhythm and routine I settle into as the year progresses. I’m looking forward to starting!
Hi everyone! My name is Jen Jacobsen and I work in college health in Minnesota (northern U.S.). While I was a history major in college, I ended up with a Russian and Eastern European (as we called it in the 90’s) concentration, mostly because I fell in love with Russian literature in translation. Tolstoy was my favorite course. While I have reread Anna Karenina a number of times, War & Peace has been too daunting to go back to in the absence of a reading community. One of my college friends invited me to join this group and I am delighted to be here!
My minor was also in Russian language and Russian/Central European politics. I love that we can keep this interest up through this tead
Hello everyone. What a huge and international group we are! My name is Sharon and I’m from the UK. I live in Leicestershire, aka “the heart of rural England”. I have just finished Simon’s year-long slow read of the Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel and can honestly say it was the best, most interesting and personally transformative thing I have done in ages. It’s reshaped my relationship with reading. So no surprise that I’m excited for War and Peace. Festive greetings to everyone!
So glad to hear of the transformative experience of reading the Wolf Hall trilogy. I thought of getting "greedy" and doing Wolf Hall AND War and Peace in 2025. Then practical sense asserted itself. I want to go through War and Peace and then perhaps Wolfe Hall next year. Thanks for your comments on how wonderful that project was.
I was tempted to do both in 2024 but I’m glad I focused just on Mantel. Now I have W&P to look forward to.
I am retired and live in Columbus, Ohio, USA. A friend who knows I’m a fan of War and Peace and the Cromwell Trilogy let me know about footnotes & tangents. This will be my fourth or fifth time reading War and Peace, but the first time in the company of a reading group.
I’m a lifelong reader. In college I was a history major, but I took more hours in English so I could have something entertaining and interesting to read.