I've been putting off reading this book for years because it's so damn huge, but I'm doing Book Riot's Read Harder challenge this year and the first task is to read a book that intimidates you. There was only one choice.

It was not a good choice. I knew it was intimidating. I did not know it was dull. There was nothing about the "war" side of this bloated monstrosity that actually interested me - not a single bit. Every spark of interest I managed to keep alive for some of the characters (primarily Natasha and Princess Mary) came to a grinding halt under the leaden nature of the rest. There might have been a decent story here, had 900 odd pages of it been cut out. Unfortunately I had to read the whole 1300, and you can be sure I will never, ever do so again. The end is particularly tedious; only the knowledge that it was just about over kept me going.

How this got to be so famous is beyond me.