In an effort to broaden my horizons and get better acquainted with the classics I have started to read War and Peace by Tolstoy. The general reply I get to this is "You're ambitious." Personally, I find this reaction strange. I enjoy reading immensely and when I come to the end of a book I am rather depressed it is over. With that in mind, I can't understand why people would not welcome the opportunity to read a book reported to be among the greatest books of all time and to have that book be quite lengthy. I am about 100 pages into the roughly 1900-2000 page work. I am impressed by the uniqueness of the characters and the details given for even minor characters that somehow only adds to the book and does not distract (ala Dickens). It also surprises me how many people simply don't read period. A few months ago I bought the biography of Neal A. Maxwell and enjoyed reading about and learning from his life. This turned out to be rather "serendipitous" since my father is going through much of the same experience with leukemia. When I visited him on Sunday he said he couldn't hardly keep track of the book since he had been sharing it with some of the other patients. It truly is a shame that as a society we have become much more involved in the, shall we say, less thought-intensive forms of media.
Friday, July 29, 2005
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3 comments:
I am suprised that you have not read that book yet! I would have thought you would have finished that one by the seventh grade!:)
From Chapter 8:
Halfway through supper Prince Andrei leaned his elbows on the table and, with a look of nervous agitation such as Pierre had never before seen on his face, began to talk- as one who has long had something on his mind and suddenly determines to speak out.
“Never, never marry, my dear fellow! That’s my advice: never marry till you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of, and until you have ceased to love the woman of your choice and have seen her plainly as she is, or else you will make a cruel and irrevocable mistake. Marry when you are old and good for nothing- or all that is good and noble in you will be lost. It will all be wasted on trifles. Yes! Yes! Yes! Don’t look at me with such surprise. If you marry expecting anything from yourself in the future, you will feel at every step that for you all is ended, all is closed except the drawing room, where you will be ranged side by side with a court lackey and an idiot!... But what’s the good?...” and he waved his arm.
Pierre took off his spectacles, which made his face seem different and the good-natured expression still more apparent, and gazed at his friend in amazement.
Yeah, I read that already and had a good laugh. However Charpter 3 ends with "Nothing's so necessary for a young man as the society of clever women." I supppose there is some happy balance to be had between the two.
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