Category: Of Literary Interest

Editor’s note: This is the tenth in a series of blog posts by Steven Axelrod, a writer reflecting on Leo Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece, War and Peace, a monumental journey of a novel that he has embarked on completing. There’s nothing quite like the irrational frustration you feel when a beloved fictional character makes a catastrophic…

Editor’s note: This is the ninth in a weekly series of blog posts by Steven Axelrod, a writer reflecting on Leo Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece, War and Peace, a monumental journey of a novel that he has embarked on completing this winter. When I started watching the Napoleonic Wars unfold in Part Two of Tolstoy’s epic…

Editor’s note: This is the eighth in a weekly series of blog posts by Steven Axelrod, a writer reflecting on Leo Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece, War and Peace, a monumental journey of a novel that he has embarked on completing this winter. The theme of this week’s passage through War and Peace is the folly of…

Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a weekly series of blog posts by Steven Axelrod, a writer reflecting on Leo Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece, War and Peace, a monumental journey of a novel that he has embarked on completing this winter. My relationship to books has always been carnal. It’s a safe, secret promiscuity. I remember…

Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of blog posts by Steven Axelrod, a writer reflecting on Leo Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece, War and Peace, a monumental journey of a novel that he has embarked on completing this winter. Sarah Hughes wound up sitting on the ice occasionally; Tiger Woods has missed some easy putts.…

Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of blog posts by Steven Axelrod, a writer reflecting on Leo Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece, War and Peace, a monumental journey of a novel that he has embarked on completing this winter. A friend of mine complained to me yesterday that the novel’s passages in French disrupted her…

Starting a classic novel in translation is like arriving in a foreign city. You look for familiar sights: street signs, even if they’re written in a language or an alphabet you can’t decipher; streets, even if they twist out of sight, cars parked along the curb even if you can’t identify the make and model,…

I have always had a problem with the classics. I find them remote and forbidding. Dauntingly verbose, armored with generations of academic exegisis, their aura of difficulty and virtue sealed under a yellowing veneer of remote time periods and foreign cultures, they were always a chore. I read them for the hard-won satisfaction I felt…