Having read so many Russian novels recently must be making this easier, because I believe this one was the easiest read yet. I'm getting used to the style, so I don't have to keep stopping to think through what the author is trying to say. That's kinda nice.
I'm not sure what I think about the book as a whole. The characters were relatable, and I enjoyed most scenes, but I usually didn't like the ways Tolstoy would resolve issues in the plot. They felt too harsh and sudden without enough meaning dredged out of them first. Still, I don't know how I'd have done it better, so I won't complain about that too much.
Other than that, I'm glad I read it. It's probably not one I'll reread again anytime soon, but that's more because of the length than the content.
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Getting out of big tech, step by step.
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Benjamin Hollon has read 0 of 25 books.
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Benjamin Hollon started reading How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2003, Harper)
How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster
What does it mean when a fictional hero takes a journey?. Shares a meal? Gets drenched in a sudden rain …
Benjamin Hollon set a goal to read 25 books in 2022
Benjamin Hollon reviewed Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Review of 'Anna Karenina' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Benjamin Hollon reviewed War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Review of 'War and Peace' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
So, War and Peace. It's a big one, for sure.
But I feel like it's a lot shorter than people think it is. War and Peace has become our archetypal "long book," but it's shorter than Les Miserables (which I read last year) and reads a lot faster. It's a book more on the scale of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is still long, but is also fairly widely read.
With that out of the way, let's get into it.
Russian Names
This is probably a common barrier to people understanding this book and others like it. In my case, I worked my way up to War and Peace by reading some of Dosteovsky's work: The Gambler, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov. At one point when I was reading Brothers K, it just clicked and I started to get how the …
So, War and Peace. It's a big one, for sure.
But I feel like it's a lot shorter than people think it is. War and Peace has become our archetypal "long book," but it's shorter than Les Miserables (which I read last year) and reads a lot faster. It's a book more on the scale of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is still long, but is also fairly widely read.
With that out of the way, let's get into it.
Russian Names
This is probably a common barrier to people understanding this book and others like it. In my case, I worked my way up to War and Peace by reading some of Dosteovsky's work: The Gambler, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov. At one point when I was reading Brothers K, it just clicked and I started to get how the names worked.
The narrative tends to either refer to characters by first name (and sometimes first plus the middle one, which is just the name of one of the parents with "vitch" or "ovna" tacked on) or by last name depending on the context.
I will say that it got a lot easier to keep track of the characters after the first quarter of the book because you start to see who's important and who isn't and can tell from their characters. For that first part, though, I'd recommend you have a chart or something where you write down each new character and who they are so you can reference it. I didn't do that, but I wished I had.
I do recommend you read some other, shorter, Russian literature before this one. I highly recommend Crime and Punishment, that was my favorite. It reads a bit slower than this, but it's also a lot shorter.
War Narrative and Philosophizing
One of the more annoying things to me was Tolstoy's constant philosophizing about the inevitability of events in a war and how the "leaders" of armies aren't really in control. It makes sense and is an interesting perspective, but it was repeated so many times. The entire Second Epilogue (12 chapters long) is about it. So yeah, that's one thing to brace yourself for.
I mean, if political commentary is your thing, you might enjoy it.
Characterization
So far I've been addressing hard things about the book, but that's not the case with this. The characterization was phenomenal. All of the characters had so many different layers and seemed extremely real.
And the development was fantastic. It was fascinating to watch all these dozens of characters growing and changing over the course of the book.
So yeah, this book is worth reading, if only for the characterization.
Overall Thoughts
Overall, this book was fantastic. There were, as I mentioned, some slow parts, but it was really well written and was actually a much easier read than I was led to expect.
Oh, and Tolstoy has got cliffhangers figured out. Once I picked it up to read a chapter or two and didn't put it down until hours later when I realized I'd read through about 150 pages.
Benjamin Hollon reviewed Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Review of 'Of Mice and Men' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Okay, so this book was a two-sided coin:
First, I thought that it had some of the best writing I've seen. Really excellent characterization, foreshadowing, and plot development. It's also pretty short; I read it in 1-2 hours.
On the other hand, it's got one of the saddest endings I've ever seen. Read at your own risk.
Overall, I thought it was very worth the read.
Benjamin Hollon rated I, Robot: 5 stars

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov's I, Robot launches readers on an adventure into a not-so-distant future where man and machine , struggle to …
Benjamin Hollon rated The Black Arrow: 4 stars
Benjamin Hollon reviewed Nemesis Games by James S. A. Corey
Review of 'Nemesis Games' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This one was... different. And I'm not sure if I liked that. It showed an extremely different side of everything, and even put on hold most of the plotlines that had been developing in the first four books.
It was probably my least favorite to read, but definitely the most intriguing from the perspective of the overall storyline; it feels like the authors took a book to step back and set a few things right before they moved on into the later books (which I have not, as of writing this review, read yet) so they can make sure to get things right later, and I like that.
ALSO there are some wonderful all-new plotlines and characters thrown in now that make me excited to see what's coming next. So yeah, different, but it has a lot of potential, depending on how the later books progress.
Benjamin Hollon reviewed Dune by Frank Herbert
Review of 'Dune' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
This was my second time reading this book, and you know, I think I liked it a little better this time. I was able to catch and appreciate some details early on that were important later, and I had a better understanding of what to expect, so some of the more confusing passages were easier to comprehend.
There's definitely some weirder stuff in this book, and I'm not sure I understood everything. Generally speaking, whenever Paul went into a trance and started seeing the future, I got a wee bit lost.
Probably my favorite thing about this book is the world that it's set in; very little context is given (until the delightfully detailed appendixes), but it's glaringly obvious that all of the casually mentioned events from the far past were well thought out and shaped how the world ended up.
I was also extremely impressed by the thinking through …
This was my second time reading this book, and you know, I think I liked it a little better this time. I was able to catch and appreciate some details early on that were important later, and I had a better understanding of what to expect, so some of the more confusing passages were easier to comprehend.
There's definitely some weirder stuff in this book, and I'm not sure I understood everything. Generally speaking, whenever Paul went into a trance and started seeing the future, I got a wee bit lost.
Probably my favorite thing about this book is the world that it's set in; very little context is given (until the delightfully detailed appendixes), but it's glaringly obvious that all of the casually mentioned events from the far past were well thought out and shaped how the world ended up.
I was also extremely impressed by the thinking through of the Guild monopoly; that was a detail that was so fascinating to think through the implications of, and it gave the story so much more realism and put constraints on some of the more obvious simple paths that could have otherwise been taken to solve problems.
So, in short, the worldbuilding is fantastic. At every point it feels so real; you can see that there are problems, that not everything went well in the past. Some authors I read (especially Asimov) have very cut-and-dried, simplified backstories that only exist to set up the story, but in Dune I really saw that a rigorously planned, realistic timeline existed, and it was fascinating to see the story flow around the figurative mountains that created rather than just changing the landscape.
Also, side note: Did you know that the Planitae (plains) and Labyrinthi (pretty much what it sounds like) on Titan (probably my favorite moon or planet in our Solar System) are named after planets from the Dune universe? I love the creativity that goes into Titan's nomenclature. (My favorite is that the mountains are named after Middle Earth mountains--Like Doom Mons! [i.e. Mount Doom])
Benjamin Hollon reviewed Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey
Review of 'Leviathan Wakes' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Um, here's a thought, but don't read it unless you've already read the book, okay:
I feel kinda horrible to say it, but I was kinda glad when Miller got killed off. Not that I wasn't sad; he was one of my favorite characters, and I really loved how he developed over the course of the novel. It's just like this: if I'm going to stick around for a what, nine-book series, I want to see that the authors aren't afraid of change. Too many books I've read are afraid to let anything happen because they want their readers to keep loving the characters they first saw. (The Oz series is predominantly on my mind; every book solved the conflict with yet another magic object to the point where one of the later plots--and in my opinion one of the more interesting ones--has an evil magician steal all their magic …
Um, here's a thought, but don't read it unless you've already read the book, okay:
I feel kinda horrible to say it, but I was kinda glad when Miller got killed off. Not that I wasn't sad; he was one of my favorite characters, and I really loved how he developed over the course of the novel. It's just like this: if I'm going to stick around for a what, nine-book series, I want to see that the authors aren't afraid of change. Too many books I've read are afraid to let anything happen because they want their readers to keep loving the characters they first saw. (The Oz series is predominantly on my mind; every book solved the conflict with yet another magic object to the point where one of the later plots--and in my opinion one of the more interesting ones--has an evil magician steal all their magic stuff, so they have to work without. I mean, seriously: how can you keep a story interesting when one character has a belt that lets them do literally anything?)
Anyway, by killing Miller, the authors have convinced me that they're going to do what's right to make an interesting story, even if it hurts the reader's feelings a bit. And that's all right. In fact, I much prefer that to static characters. I don't want a bunch of novels with practically identical plots. (I'm talking to you, Sherlock Holmes and Hardy Boys.)
And to those who have read further into the series (preferably until Cibola Burn):
Yes, I realize Miller came back. My point stands; he definitely was extremely changed and arguably not even the original person at all.
Benjamin Hollon reviewed Cibola Burn by James S. A. Corey
Review of 'Cibola Burn' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
To tell the truth, I was saddened to see the Expanse universe expanded beyond our minuscule solar system. I really loved the limited scope of the first books, where you had people trying to fight a vast incomprehensible menace when they could hardly manage their own system.
But this book has pacified me a bit. The colonists in this story are limited as well; in fact, this one's even more limited than the first books were. I like that. It gives me hope that this series won't end up with humanity being a huge advanced civilization akin to the very one they're trying to find/investigate.
(spoiler for 2001: a Space Odyssey) That's possibly the only thing I didn't like about the 2001 book (the movie was terrible in regards to explaining things to the viewer, so I'll pretend it didn't exist): the transcendence of humanity. I get that the whole …
To tell the truth, I was saddened to see the Expanse universe expanded beyond our minuscule solar system. I really loved the limited scope of the first books, where you had people trying to fight a vast incomprehensible menace when they could hardly manage their own system.
But this book has pacified me a bit. The colonists in this story are limited as well; in fact, this one's even more limited than the first books were. I like that. It gives me hope that this series won't end up with humanity being a huge advanced civilization akin to the very one they're trying to find/investigate.
(spoiler for 2001: a Space Odyssey) That's possibly the only thing I didn't like about the 2001 book (the movie was terrible in regards to explaining things to the viewer, so I'll pretend it didn't exist): the transcendence of humanity. I get that the whole point was showing the development of humans from apes into extremely wise seemingly omniscient beings, but it didn't work for me. I would much rather have had humanity see these other beings and decide that they could handle things on their own. I always doubt it when an entire civilization, or even a tiny subset, can somehow put aside everything that's wrong with them.
Benjamin Hollon rated Caliban's War: 5 stars

Caliban's War by James S. A. Corey
On Ganymede, breadbasket of the outer planets, a Martian marine watches as her platoon is slaughtered by a monstrous supersoldier. …
Benjamin Hollon rated Abaddon's Gate: 4 stars

Abaddon's Gate by James S. A. Corey
Abaddon's Gate is the third book in the New York Times bestselling Expanse series.
For generations, the solar system - …