Reading

How do you like to read? I'd love to hear how different people go about their reading lives.

For the last ten days or so my main activity and preoccupation has been reading War and Peace, the great Russian novel by Leo Tolstoy. It became the centrepiece of my days; it dominated my thoughts, dreams and moods. I first read it many years ago in an old Penguin edition but recently a friend loaned me a new translation of the work which came out in 2007. Published by Viking, this edition is translated, introduced and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The book is long, more than 1200 big pages. Except for the last section of the Epilogue, I found it a thrilling and profound page-turner.

I feel its effect is still filtering down into my mind. I want to think about it more before I say too much about it. One thing's for sure though: it's put me off all other novels for the time being at least. (That's not counting the odd bit of crime fiction which I put into another category.)

Tolstoy has blown away the cute little plan I had going for reading books on the Man Booker Prize list. I'd managed to reserve the Booker Prize books from my local libraries but when I went to collect them I just couldn't face them any more. I'll read a thousand pages of Tolstoy with glee but please, don't ask me to read a big modern door stopper - not now, not any more.

Novels were once considered dangerous, immoral, a device of the devil and there's still a touch of that around in the sense that reading a novel all day, day in and day out, week in and week out, is regarded as being idle, being lazy, doing nothing. When, as we all know, wisdom and moral strength is found in being busy (but not busy reading novels). Yet for me the best way to read is to go about it seriously, get right into the book and make it the centre of daily life. This also goes for non-fiction reading.