By Leo Tolstoy — Penguin Classics translation
Growing Up with Pierre and Natasha: My Epic Adventure with War and Peace
A Book Too Big for a Twelve-Year-Old
It all started with my mum.
I was twelve, on a trip to the bookshop with her, my sister, and my mum’s friend. Mum’s friend, with the best of intentions, suggested buying me Winnie the Pooh, her own childhood favourite. My mum shut that down immediately. “Winnie the Pooh is for babies,” she said, adding that I had a reading age four years above my own and shouldn’t waste my time on books that “teach you nothing.”
So, naturally, she picked the largest, most intimidating thing on the shelf: a 1,200-page behemoth of War and Peace, printed in size 9 font. I was twelve. I didn’t stand a chance. I made it through one chapter, maybe two, before the book was quietly exiled to the shelf, where it sat gathering dust for a decade.
Ten Years Later
At 22, I picked it up again. I’d like to say it was out of some grand intellectual ambition, but honestly, it was guilt. The book had been staring at me from the shelf for ten years, and of course the occasional quip from my mum “have you read War and Peace yet?”
What followed wasn’t a reading experience so much as a relationship. It took me five years to finish. Five years. In that time, I went from being a university undergraduate to moving countries, starting my first job, living through multiple heartbreaks, and eventually beginning a PhD. The book was there through all of it. Not always open on my bedside table, but always waiting.
I’d pick it up when I was in the mood. Each time I came back, it was like catching up with old friends. Pierre was still fumbling his way through an existential crisis. Natasha was still making impulsive, breathtaking, infuriating decisions. Andrei was still quietly disillusioned with everything. They’d changed a little since I’d last checked in, just as I had, and there was something deeply comforting in that.
Characters That Breathe
What makes Tolstoy extraordinary, and what kept pulling me back across those five years, is how stubbornly, achingly human his characters are. They aren’t archetypes. They aren’t moral lessons wearing a costume. They’re messy, contradictory, and inconsistent in exactly the way real people are. Pierre’s desperate search for meaning, Natasha’s capacity to be both luminous and reckless, Andrei’s slow erosion of idealism. I saw pieces of myself in all of them at different points, depending on what stage of my own life I was muddling through.
Tolstoy weaves their lives together without ever making it feel engineered. People cross paths, drift apart, reconnect. It mirrors the way real friendships actually work. Not the tidy arcs of most fiction, but the uneven, surprising rhythms of real life. You lose touch with someone for months or years, and when you find them again, they’re different, and so are you, and somehow it still works.
The State of the Evidence
By the time I turned the last page, my copy of War and Peace looked like it had been through its own war. The front cover was held on with duct tape. The first twenty pages were missing a corner, courtesy of my dog’s enthusiastic chewing phase. The pages were stained with coffee, and tears. It didn’t know what it was any more, that book. But then, neither did I for most of those five years. Somehow that felt right.
What It Taught Me
I don’t think I’ll ever have an experience like this with another book. Most novels you read in days or weeks. You consume them, enjoy them, and move on. War and Peace didn’t work like that. It became a companion. A constant thread running through five years of change, uncertainty, and growing up.
It taught me patience, though not in the way people usually mean when they say that about long books. It wasn’t patience as in gritting my teeth through the slow parts. It was patience as in learning to trust that something difficult and sprawling could still be worth the time. That not everything worthwhile comes quickly or easily, and that the journey itself can be the point.
When I finally closed it, I felt a strange, genuine grief. Not because of the ending, but because it was over. I was saying goodbye to people I’d known for years.
My mum was wildly ambitious buying it for a twelve-year-old. But she was right, in the end. That battered, duct-taped copy will always have a place on my shelf. Not as a trophy, but as proof that some things are worth the long way round.
One Too Many Books 