How Long Did it Take?

My older one and I finally finished “War and Peace” the other night.   I’ve read it aloud to her, ten pages at a time and now, we’re done.  Sometimes we read every night.  Sometimes we didn’t read a passage for weeks.  There are fourteen hundred or so pages.  How long did it take?  I really can’t recall when’d I’d bought it, though I do know where, down at the Page One book store, there in San Li Tun, when I came across it randomly and thought “yes.” 

I just looked and the first entry I every put about it in this blog seems to have been from September of 2016.  But the description of what we read was already up to Book One, Chapter twenty-five.  I think we got it in the spring of 2016, which means I lugged it all the way biking through Provence and the next summer traveling in East Africa and then again, certainly, traveling across the Siberia by train.  The Anthony Briggs translation we read survived it all well enough.  The cover is still intact, though no one would call its condition “new.”  I wonder if she’ll take it with her when she heads off to school?

And with so many exceptional scenes, where I put down the book, caught my breath and said: “that was incredible, huh?”,  I’m rifling through them in my mind now, considering all the places we read these scenes; car rides, bedside, airport lounges . . . it has to be said that the last fifty pages or so, where Leo introduces us to his philosophy of history is a bit dry and less well-suited than most of the book, to reading aloud.  Still, it wasn’t over until we’d read the final sentence.

Mary McCarthy has an impossible act to follow.  Her novel “The Group” has been sitting on my shelf for some time.  It’s young ladies at Vassar in the thirties, rather than Napoleon at the outset of the nineteenth century, but I miss New York, and my daughter’s heading off to college this fall and so we read the first ten pages tonight.  Her acceptance letters are coming from colleges in New York State and in California, others await.  Where will she wind up?  She’s anxious, excited, perhaps young ladies in college from ninety years ago will suit this anticipatory period.  This will probably be the last work we ever have a chance to share this way.  A mere five hundred pages, we’ll be done with this in no time.

Thursday, 01//31/19