Over a long, cold, rainy weekend, I quietly and with little or no fanfare, finished War and Peace. The conditions were ideal for hours spent reading in a cozy chair, so that's exactly what I did. I feel a natural sense of accomplishment, but I can't help but notice that my life has been profoundly changed in the past by much shorter books, and this time around, 1200 pages later, I don't feel very different. It was good, and it is worth the effort, and Tolstoy does not waste a single one of those 1200 pages. But that said, Anna Karenina was better, at least for me. When I finished Moby Dick, for example, I felt exhilarated, and like I had finally learned the meaning of a universal truth about Melville and that novel, but with War and Peace, I feel no such thing. Maybe it doesn't help that basically no one I know has ever read War and Peace because it is so absurdly long, and maybe it was never going to live up to the time it took to finish. I wouldn't really recommend reading it to anyone, but I will go ahead and endorse the upcoming BBC adaptation, which looks really lovely. No official trailer yet, but I'll share it when it comes out.

Now on to the most important issue: what should be my next big fat book?