It's always tempting, when reading the great novelists especially, to try to sift through the text to discover something of their own, personal opinions and beliefs. It can be tricky - we can misinterpret, or see things we want to see, or even ascribe meaning where there is none, particularly. With a book like this it's easier: Tolstoy made his own "quote of the day" calendar, essentially, except there's more than one (themed) quote per day and he adds a little piece of commentary of his own - s

It's always tempting, when reading the great novelists especially, to try to sift through the text to discover something of their own, personal opinions and beliefs. It can be tricky - we can misinterpret, or see things we want to see, or even ascribe meaning where there is none, particularly. With a book like this it's easier: Tolstoy made his own "quote of the day" calendar, essentially, except there's more than one (themed) quote per day and he adds a little piece of commentary of his own - sometimes as little as a sentence, sometimes as much as a couple of paragraphs. This was his pet project, according to the introduction, and readers can see what questions of ethics and philosophy and religion mattered to him most. The vast bulk of the subject matter is religious (particularly Christian, though a substantial amount comes from other traditions) and not being religious myself I can admire the writing and the emphasis on kindness, for example, without sympathising with everything that Tolstoy does. He seems to have a consistent hate-on for science, for example, and it's pretty clear he thinks it's a waste of time and brain space when people could be focusing on their spiritual life and so forth. At one point, there's a piece of writing that laments the waste of intellect in figuring our why water freezes or (my favourite!) how diseases spread, because goodness knows its easier to contemplate the divine in perfect happiness if all your children are dead of whooping cough. The book would get three stars from me if it weren't for that particular emphasis.



No higher, however. The introduction kind of poisoned the book for me and the disappointment lasted. Apparently in the original text (one of them at least) Tolstoy wrote what seemed to be very well-regarded short stories, one for each week of the year. But, the translator says, they didn't appear in all editions and they're quite long all together (!) so he didn't bother. Frankly, I'd rather have read the stories, and given that Tolstoy's great novels were massive doorstopper books then surely the page count could have been increased here to compensate.



