Forget everything you’ve heard about its obscene girth (1444 pages in my edition). Throw away the popular notion that it’s an impenetrable Russian monster where every character has four different names. You may have other issues that separate you from the epic tale Tolstoy set during Napoleon’s early nineteenth-century invasion of Russia. Whatever they are, get over them already and read this great story, considered by some to be the finest novel ever written.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but your eighth-grade English literature teacher was right after all: Tolstoy can write a page-turner and this is the one that will turn’em the fastest. Should you call her up and apologize?
Anna Karenina may leave you gasping in the end where War and Peace concludes with a whimper. But nothing can compare with the author’s great accomplishment in War: He has seamlessly woven together a moving human tale of suffering, banal poseurs, and the restless Russian longing to achieve something noble with a vast Napoleonic panoramic of historic proportions. That little man did everything largely, including his doomed invasion-think Blitzkrieg, 1939; Hitler must not have read War and Peace—of a land whose people have long grown accustomed to absorbing the worst that history and nature can deal them and then surprising everyone but themselves by surviving.
As though this achievement were small, Tolstoy intermittently interrupts the flow of his narrative to take on the vexed problem of the relationship between experienced events and remembered history. Napoleon, it seems, is not the only ambitious man in this book. Like the diminutive French general, Tolstoy loses his battle on this front, but not without describing what’s at stake in enduring, quasi-philosophical style that for a moment makes one wonder whether we ever decide anything.
Can you be an educated, understanding human being without having read this standard of Russian and—by translation—Western literature? Maybe. Probably.
But don’t take the risk. Read the book.
Canter Bridge 
I have just found your blog on War and Peace and will try to follow you through the book. Reading it was a high point in my reading experience.
I like long books — Middlemarch, Bleak House, Clarissa Harlowe — brong them on! For years I had the intention to read War and Peace, I and thousands of other well-intentioned readers. I found a copy at a book sale and put it on the shelf. It was a mass market paperback edition, a veritable paper brick on crumbling paper. Every time I picked it up, I quickly put it down again.
Then I got a tip from a collector. Buy a good edition, preferably the Maude translation, on good paper in fair-sized type and with pictures and maps, if possible.
The rest is history, mine not Tolstoy’s.