Tolstoy - War and Peace III

"What a load of rubbish"


"This book is what we had before soapies!"


"TERRIBLE. HORRIBLE. BORING. LONGER THAN THE BIBLE."


"Quite possibly the most over-rated 'classic' novel ever. Half of it isn't even a novel, but a history account of Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812."


"I believe if I read this book in my twenties, I would have appreciated it., but I have read so many wonderful well-written stories that I was not impressed."


"To be honest, I don't have any letters after my name in relation to literature but I'm a writer and reader myself and I know what I like. This novel is arguably one of the most overrated novels in the history of the written word. It is tedious from beginning to end. Tolstoy rambles on without any sense of real structure developing. It is incomprehensible that it is so beloved to millions of people, most of whom just read it so they can say 'I read War and Peace' to their friends who (wisely) have chosen not to sacrifice three or four months of their lives to study this mess."


"Ever read through a page only to realize that you were daydreaming the whole time and don't quite remember what you read. That happened to me through most of this book. That happens with most books"


"One of the previous reviews comments on Tolstoy's philosophical and sociological views, none of which seem to be conveyed to any extent in this longwinded attempt at storytelling. Periods of poorly described bouts of war and meaningless efforts to describe and accurately portray the interactions within the unrealistic social circles make this so-called 'classic' more like a soap opera than a work of literary genius. The inadequate manner in which the occurances in the book are described are discouraging to educated intellectuals like myself."


"Exceedingly dull with only a few interesting characters who will probably come to irritate you."


"It just didn’t know what it wanted to be. It ended up being so dull and boring and absolutely ridiculous."


"Having read the reviews of others, it reminds me of the emperor's new clothes. Reviewers should be true to the subject matter not state what they believe others expect. Sometimes a Mills and Boons story is just that."


"Honestly, I can't understand why it is considered literature: the characters have no depths and their behaviours, feelings are so similar that it made me think a few of them were the same person."


"The writer sort of sucks and is a hard read. His characters are sort of flaky and disjointed if you want my opinion. I don' see what the big deal is... Tolstoy is just plain verbous!!"


"Typically Russian, in 'why use one sentence when 20 pages will do.' Possibly the most verbose book I have ever read"


"To Tolstoy, the future is predestined by the present and past. He lived in the era before the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, wherein we only proclaim one set of events to have a higher probability than another, rather than a certainty. This uncertainty concept is foreign to the philosophy Tolstoy proclaimed here, and certainly limits the value of the book to current day thinking."