I've made a very respectable dent in my first week with War and Peace, reaching the 100-page milestone last night. My initial thought is that this will not fit into my normal reading routine the way I had hoped; in a normal week, I read when I feel like it, and somehow I manage to transform it all into a blog. But there is no way I'm going to get through War and Peace without being much more deliberate. I made it all the way to Sunday night without even cracking the thing open, although I did find that it makes the perfect prop for my Kindle when I'm watching 'Gilmore Girls' in bed. In the end, the only way I managed to conquer those 100 pages was to set aside specific, uninterrupted time to read, and I had to neglect my usual TV habits, which is tough in January when there is so much great TV. The saddest thing of all is that those 100 pages were not easy, and as a result I haven't picked up any other book all week, which is not sustainable. I think it's going to take a few weeks to find a War and Peace routine that works for me.

On a more positive note, I absolutely love the novel thus far. It's not super surprising because I loved Anna Karenina and I've enjoyed more Napoleonic history than the average person. The narrative thrusts the reader into several existing, high-stakes conflicts (inheritances, engagements, husbands going to war, etc.) from the very beginning so it's not hard to get "into" the book. As much as I loved Anna Karenina, I definitely struggled with those very long passages on Russian agrarian politics, and at close to 1200 pages, I suspect War and Peace will have some of the same, but thus far it's been very compelling, engaging narrative and charming characters.