Sidewords

It is an odd experience to enjoy a book while finding its plot boring and its characters  irritating.  The story and characters were incidental, just vehicles for Tolstoy to show off his ability to break the world into its subtlest moments. He drops the tiniest of details without it ever feeling tedious, and he does it for nearly 1000 pages.  I never cared about the characters, and like relatives that have overstayed their welcome, I was glad to see them go.  Nevertheless, I read the whole thing with awe.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.