Hmmmmmm......Well. Have you read this? Will you ever read this? No. I'm going to go ahead and say probably not. Did I enjoy it? No. Did it remind me of the pain and torture that I felt as a kid being forced to read books for junior high and high school english when I tried to forge on despite being blind with bordom? Pretty much. Sure, Tolstoy writes with some lovely similes, metaphors, and analogies, which all in all adds up to some lovely style and prose, but this book could be about a thousand pages shorter. By the time she finally committed suicide I was just sitting there thinking, "Wow, there it was. The one thing that could have saved this book if it happened months ago." I would have killed her myself if I had to read her cry-baby garbage for another ten pages. I know Tolstoy was purposefully pointing the finger at hypocrites in Russian high society, but it reads like five seasons of "The Days of our Lives." The characters that I liked at the front end of this monster, Levin and Oblonsky, became so tiresome and annoying by the end that I could no longer bear them either. Can we revisit the same arguments again Mr. Tolstoy? I haven't heard them drag on about the state of the Russian class system or share-cropping quite enough. Maybe Anna can say the exact same thing for the 37th time? Part of this project is to try and read these masters, but this book makes me think that an attempt at War and Peace could be the end of me. I'm sure there are a million critics who would write me off as an idiot from now on if they somehow stumbled upon and read this, but I just have to be honest. This book drags like a dog's dirty butt across a freshly cleaned shag carpet and has less entertainment value then watching such an act. Keep reading.
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