Funny, I'm just reading War and Peace myself (the Anthony Briggs translation) and having the same reaction, gushing occasionally to people I know how approachable it is, and how darkly funny and modern it feels. Well, at least after passing through the first ~200 pages which are a slog. I didn't find even Tolstoy's historical musings boring, although he tends to repeat himself. And I usually suck at names, but the main characters are done so well I find them easy to remember. There aren't that many important ones despite how it seems at the start. It also serves as a fascinating peek into the daily lives of Russians of all stripes in the early 1800s.

I also had the same reaction to Crime and Punishment as the OP did.

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user3939382 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Read those first 200 pages 10x could never get past it. 300 characters with names that I’ll never remember, some woman and her son, a general or something. A guy that keeps saying “Capital!”, standing around at parties.

I’m sure it’s good but I don’t think I have it in me to try again.

	▲	stevenwoo 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I swear it took me six retries to make it past the start. But if you have six hours the BBC adaptation is pretty good IMHO and captures many of the essentials of the book if not all the details. The show made me cry and the book did not have the same effect but maybe that was because it focused on certain aspects. I particularly remember the combat scenes in the book would have been difficult to match - the prose capturing the chaos and randomness of brutality in the neighborhood of D Day landing in Saving Private Ryan but with horse cavalry charges and cannon fire.