Here is my simple encouragement for the new year: read the great books. They require effort (I’ll give some brief advice below) but they are great precisely because they repay that effort. You might read War and Peace and decide never to read it again, but the point is not that every great book will become your favorite. The point is that great books offer something worth struggling through. 

I recently finished reading War and Peace (here is a great three-volume edition), which I picked up this year after coming across a full set of The Great Books of the Western World at a bookstore. It was the original 54-volumed edition and in great condition. So, we bought it.

I began looking at reading plans for working through the set. One of them, a ten-year plan, said to read the first three of War and Peace’s fifteen books for the first year. Since I had already purchased the complete works of Tolstoy on Audible, I decided to start there. But once I reached Book Three, I was hooked.

To my surprise, War and Peace has become one of my favorite books. It is extraordinary. Of course, as with any work of its size, there are moments where it drags, but overall it is a captivating and profound piece of literature, certainly worthy of being called a great book.

Indeed, one of the major differences between a good book and a great one is the sheer density of ideas. Plenty of good books wrestle with meaningful concepts and are certainly worth reading. In fact, a wide range of good books prepares you to truly profit from the great ones. But the great books take on the biggest questions (theology, human nature, morality, history, civilization, meaning, etc.), and they do so at great depth.

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Consider this analogy used by Tolstoy in chapter 4 of the first epilogue (yes, there are two epilogues to the story):

As the sun and each atom of ether is a sphere complete in itself, and yet at the same time only a part of a whole too immense for man to comprehend, so each individual bears within himself his own aims and yet bears them to serve a general purpose incomprehensible to man.

A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower, and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely, says that the bee gathers pollen-dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee’s existence.

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