War and Peace (Wordsworth Classics)

Great price just be aware long thick book with tiny print I didn’t care because I have been wanting to read this book and not spend too much money

Everyone should read this at least once in their lifetime.

This book is absolutely amazing. It is magnificent as a literary piece. It completely deserves its title of best literature piece of all times. It is very long over 900 pages and the writings are very small so it takes a while to read it. However the literature and the story plot are thought out beautifully and skillfully. Dozens of main characters and each described in details. It is sad, happy, funny and then provocative. It is definitely full of surprises. It is hard to predict the outcome if you have no clue about the book. That is why it is awesome. In the end you are shocked with the outcome. It is a must read book. A literature treasure.

I ordered the paperback book because I had never read this classic story. It arrived timely and in perfect condition. It's easy to hold and to read.

The cover was different but I do not mind!

Best cover art in my opinion for classics.

My 12-year-old daughter started reading War & Peace but asked if we could read it together as a family read aloud. I decided to buy this copy because we have other Wordsworth Classics that we love. I was disappointed to find that the cover is different, it doesn't have the gold foil on the cover and the print is SO SMALL. I don't need glasses, but I think I would need some to read this book. I actually ended up requesting to return it, not because of the print size but because the book was shipped in a bag instead of a box and it arrived damaged. I guess next time I'll need to hold the book in my hands and see the print size before I purchase another copy of War & Peace.

I don't know if it's just because of this Maude translation (which is itself 90 years old) but W&P reads like a modern novel, not one from the 19th century. Very impressive. Just a few nitpicks:-Every so often Tolstoy interrupts the narrative to describe his theory of how history works. There's nothing wrong with that and it was actually pretty interesting, but he went way overboard with it in the second epilogue. Fifty or so pages of it is just too much, especially since he's pretty much just saying the same thing over and over.-Lots of characters to keep up with. It was easy to keep track of the important ones, but there are several minor characters introduced who disappear for huge chunks only to show up again long after I've forgotten who they are.-MOST of the French dialogue is translated into English, but this particular translation leaves some lines here and there annoyingly untranslated. It's fine if they wanted to preserve the "flavor" of the dialogue, but there should have been footnoted translations. A character will say something in French (or in one case German) and another character will be like "Wow. That's a good point," but I'll have no idea what that point was. Not a big deal though.