A Year of War and Peace 2017
So, who saw this all the way through, besides me? Sad that some original participants no longer seem to be here. Tis the nature of the beast, I suppose. They come, they go. But, I do miss you guys.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/11939270
Anyway, I enjoyed doing this. I managed to only miss a couple of days which I caught up with the following day. Mostly I learned a lot about stoicism, which I have found quite comforting in these troubled times. The writer, Brian Denton, ended each discussion with a quote from Epictetus or occasionally Marcus Aurelius or Seneca. I copied and pasted several, like this:
This is the chief thing: Do not be perturbed, for all things are according to the nature of the universal; and in a little time you will be nobody and nowhere, like Hadrian and Augustus.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Denton's final summation:
"What Tolstoy is saying is that we must abandon old ways of thinking if those ways of thinking no longer stand to reason. And isn’t that what we’ve been working on this year? Hasn’t our project been a project of self-improvement by means of literary and philosophical reflection on the lives of Tolstoy’s characters? Haven’t we thought about new ways to address the vicissitudes of life and perhaps avoid the many existential pitfalls those characters fell into? That’s been the idea anyway. I hope it’s helped." (It has.)
Denton says he plans to do this with another book. I am looking forward to it and will let you know what it is, if I can find it. Medium is kind of hard to figure out sometimes..
= new reply since forum marked as read
I thought it was a great way to get through a major piece of literature. I had to read W&P back in high school and hated much of it. So I did not reread it, just read what Brian wrote every day. I was able to recall the basics of the tale. I am glad I did it because there is much to be gained, except from the epilogues which do nothing to benefit the book as far as I can tell.
Before you abandon Russian lit altogether you might want to consider this:
Amor Towles' A Gentleman In Moscow, an epic writ small, a story of Tolstoyan scope on a minute scale. Here we see a country in repeated upheaval over the course of decades—from the end of Imperial Russia in the Bolshevik Revolution past the rise of the USSR, a period that includes the defeat of one of history’s greatest evils by a country that becomes another—and we see it all from one man’s limited viewpoint. ...
It's quite enjoyable and a heck of a lot easier to read than W&P but having done so makes it more interesting, I think. YMMV, of course. 
daily reading is over now. Now we are waiting to see what book he will do this year. Denton says he plans to publish an ebook of all the daily War and Peace posts. 
