I didn't bother posting last week because I read a pretty negligible amount and had very little insight to share. It's funny how when you're not reading War and Peace, there isn't enough time in the day for all the things you want to do, and when you are reading War and Peace, time couldn't possibly move more slowly. I'm normally a very fast reader, but this text is really testing my patience; obviously, I'm 11 weeks into reading it, which is frustrating enough, but even on a page-by-page level, I get frustrated. Sometimes I catch myself checking the page number multiple times per page, assuming I've read much more than I actually have, and then I find myself in a frustrating cul-de-sac of impatience and boredom mixed with an overwhelming need to finish this damn thing.

A few more stray thoughts on Tolstoy, War and Peace, and long books:

- I absolutely hate it when heroines experience some form of heartbreak and then become physically ill. That's not a real thing, and it's especially not a real thing if the person who broke your heart was practically a stranger to begin with

- This novel is exquisitely foot-noted, but there is an utter lack of footnotes regarding social conventions of Moscow in the early 1800s, so I really struggle to figure out what behavior is unusual or immoral. Some of the roguish male characters don't seem that bad to me, but I think that's because I'm missing the subtext re: gambling/drinking/racing carriages/dueling/prostitutes?

- Speaking of dueling, it rarely ends with one dead guy and one living guy, so what exactly is the point? If 90% of duels end in weird accidents, for example, why continue dueling?

- Must we constantly be reading characters' first and last names over and over and over again? Last night I was reading a scene in which a doctor's wife was entertaining some soldiers (once again with the moral ambiguities -- is she supposed to be slutty in this case?) and her full name was dropped in every reference, and in one particular sentence it was used something like five or six times. I cannot with that. I also can't tell if this is a deliberate stylistic choice (the implied irony being the formality of her name paired with the impropriety of her behavior), or is it just to help us keep track of the 200 or so characters in this thing?