One item on my “25 for ’25 list” was to participate in Simon Haisell’s “Slow Read” of War and Peace. What a joy this project has been! I loved being submerged in that world for an entire year. The first time I read the novel, I read it fast (despite what you might think, it really is a page-turner), and reading just one chapter each day helped me to absorb it. For instance, now every time I walk through the Met, I think of Pierre:

All at once he felt that this would not do, and that tonight he was a person obliged to perform some sort of awful rite which everyone expected of him, and that he was therefore bound to accept their services. He took the glove in silence from the adjutant, and sat down in the lady’s chair, placing his huge hands symmetrically on his knees in the naive attitude of an Egyptian statue.