Search results for: “war and peace”
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The War-and-Peace-O-Meter: Week Five
Previous weeks: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 I finished the first volume this week, just as Mrs. Monkeyshines was going into labour. Twenty-four hours later, our first child was born, a Little Monkey called Toby Charles. Things are going well so far, and I might have a chance to snatch a few chapters over the…
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The War-and-Peace-O-Meter: Week Four
Previous weeks: 0, 1, 2, 3 Pretty much bang-on the 20% mark this week. I had hoped to get through it a bit quicker, but while it’s eminently readable, it’s not the sort of book you can churn through at a rate of knots. And, since I’m only going to read this book once, I…
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The War-and-Peace-O-Meter: Week Three
Previous weeks: 0, 1, 2 The battles in War and Peace have been good reading this week, although my progress has been somewhat stymied by the BBC. They’ve adapted Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels (two of which I have previously reviewed: Case Histories and One Good Turn), which Mrs. Monkeyshines and I have enjoyed settling…
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The War-and-Peace-O-Meter: Week Two
Previous weeks: 0, 1 Well into part two of volume one of War and Peace, and the men have gone off to war. Although as yet there’s been no actual fighting; I suspect that the marching, waiting around, and wonderfully frantic retreat are more typical of the realities of war. More pragmatically, I’m on page…
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The War-and-Peace-O-Meter: Week One
Last week I explained that I would be tracking my progress while I read War and Peace. I think I’ve done quite well in this first week, although I do feel like a bit of a lemon pulling it out of my bag on the bus. I’m getting to grips with the characters and their…
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The War-and-Peace-O-Meter
Some years ago I asked for War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy for Christmas; a new translation had just been published, and that seemed as good a reason as any to tackle this metaphorically and literally immense book. I do a lot of my reading on the bus, which has tended to put me off…
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Book Battle 5: Bibliomania
Just in time for Christmas, the return of a Monkeyshines “favourite” that precisely no-one has asked to see make a return! Yes, it’s a rather random, rather pointless, book battle, where the books (rather than the books’ characters) struggle against my tortuous metaphors and each other, and the rounds are decided using a list of…
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Twinkle, Twinkle,…
I tend not to re-read books, largely because I extend my library at a faster rate than I read, so I’m slowly accumulating an ever-increasing number of unread books. But sometimes it’s nice to revisit an old favourite, either to find that while the text has remained constant, the reader has changed sufficiently to discover…