War and Peace

Introduction by Robbie

On Christmas Day 2020 I read my mother a passage from War and Peace. I can't remember which one. The next day, Boxing Day, I looked at the novel properly: four volumes, an epilogue, roughly 360 chapters. I did the maths. A chapter a day would take almost exactly a year.

We had been reading poems and children's books since April. Lovely, but small. I had just tried The Once and Future King and it wasn't working for her. Something needed to change, and the scale of Tolstoy felt right. A commitment. Not just to a book, but to a practice.

It took from Boxing Day 2020 to 21 December 2021. Just under a year. There are stumbles over Russian names throughout, and I never did quite settle on how to pronounce Bolkonsky. You can hear my children in some of the recordings. There's a chapter I re-recorded because my mother said she couldn't hear me properly.

This was the reading that turned a lockdown habit into something permanent. By the time we finished, stopping was unthinkable.