We should stop saying “War and Peace” is hard to read

By mossOcean

I might be jumping the gun here since I’m not even 5% into it yet, but honestly this is not nearly the brutal slog I was bracing for. The things that seem actually hard so far are: - It’s really long. - A ton of Russian names, plus different titles and nicknames for the same people, though I guess that’s pretty normal for Tolstoy. - Some vocabulary that’s a little fiddly, but I’ve dealt with way worse wording in other books. Other than those maybe-obvious hurdles, I’m actually liking it a lot. The characters and the setting details are really nice, and the political/historical stuff is interesting too. There’s also a lot of good royal arguing, so it kind of feels like a fancy soap opera. So yeah, it’s not as intimidating as I thought. What do you all think? Edit: I don’t usually do edits like this, but I wanted to clear up a couple things. Sorry if my wording came off like I was looking down on anyone. I saw one comment that thought I was gatekeeping, which was basically the opposite of what I meant. I actually feel like the gatekeeping goes the other way sometimes, like people act as if the book is too hard for anyone to enjoy. I realized pretty quickly that the actual prose wasn’t as dense or exhausting as I expected. For me, a book’s length matters less than the wording on the page. Something like Heart of Darkness is way denser and harder to get into than War and Peace, at least for me. I shouldn’t have said the book is accessible for everybody. I wasn’t trying to claim it was easy—because it isn’t—and I even said in the first sentence that I might be speaking too soon. Based on what people are saying in the comments, I’m guessing there are tougher parts later on. Sorry if I sounded smug or arrogant or just plain dumb for posting this. It was my first post here, and probably my last. Thanks to the people who were actually contributing to the discussion.