“War and Peace” in my bicycle helmet one summer!
New Year’s Day puts the “e” in ennui.
While your husband watches TV, you peruse a Top Book of 2014 chosen by a critic whose taste doesn’t coincide with yours.
But this year will be different.
On New Year’s Day, Radio 4 in the UK will broadcast a 10-hour dramatisation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, starring Simon Russell Beale, Lesley Manville and John Hurt. There will be interruptions for news breaks and The Archers.
You can listen to War and Peace at the Radio 4 website.
One small problem: the time difference.
9 a.m. in the UK is 3 a.m. here. It doesn’t seem likely I will be up at 3, does it? But I will be up at 9 a.m., or, err, 3 p.m. there.
I reread War and Peace this year and loved it. I am very much looking forward to the dramatization on New Year’s Day.
MORE BOOK NEWS.
The Washington Post Book World has announced its Top 10 Books of the Year.
Goodreads has announced the Goodreads Choice Awards of 2014 (most of these are on the lighter, poppier side).
It is the 40th anniversary of the publication of Shardik, the second novel of Richard Adams, who is best known for Watership Down.
Times Higher Education has published an article on novels about campus life.
mirabile dictu 
10 hours! I will record it and listen in chunks I think – though I should read the book first!! 🙂
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I wish they’d read aloud the book instead; even an abridgement would be better. I say this because I’ve tried these dramatizations, and those I’ve listened to have been sentimentalizations. Look at that cast. one could be narrator and the others speak the lines of the characters — that Tolstoy wrote!
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Karen, recording is a good idea. I am so untechnological: perhaps the computer knows how to record?
Ellen, I did think of listening to part of an audiobook. I haven’t heard a radio dramatization in years. I’m thinking a radio dramatization might actually work better than a TV drama. I know this book very well, and wonder how they’ll present the different charcters. (Surely they’ll have to cut some.) Every dramatization I’ve seen of Tolstoy has been a fallure, but radio may be the way to go.
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