Tolstoy, Henry James, Sterne, and finishing War and Peace

I finished the Andrew Bromfield original War and Peace. Took me a month. I lie: a month and a week. And it was didn't like the ending. It was too sudden.

I glanced through the Mauds' translation of War and Peace and found the font unbearably small - like, 9 or 10 points - and these weird transliterations of the Russian place and person names, involving lots of apostrophes above them. Much harder reading than the lovely Bromfield text.

To celebrate the read I bought Henry James' Portrait of A Lady, in the suberb new and inexpensive Viking edition, stunningly typeset on clean white paper with 12 point font and plenty of margin space. And I bought the bargain basement Wordsworth edition of Tristram Shandy, because I had heard it was funny and because Balzac quotes it at the start of his fantasy novel about the magical ass's skin.

I also tried to work out which books are my top ten. It was hard! I needed it to be either collected works or a very very good compedium. But that is another story, for another blog entry.