At The Millions, John Maher interviews Yiyun Li, author of Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li, based on the collective read-through of War and Peace which she lead last year.
"TM: Do you find that the structure of a big book informs your writing or your reading practice in a way that’s different from the structure of a much smaller novel?
"YL: Yes. Reading War and Peace, to me, is like writing a novel. You cannot finish writing a novel in one sitting, and you cannot finish reading a novel like that in one sitting. It’s a steady pacing, to me. It’s both good for my reading and my writing as a habit, to spend the same amount of time, every day, on the same book, usually around the same time. Usually I read around 11:00 p.m., 11:30. It’s part of the scaffolding of my life at this moment."
See Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilytch, "The Three Hermits", and "What Men Live By", in Gateway to the Great Books (10 Vol., 1963) volume 3, and War and Peace, in Great Books of the Western World (first edition, 52 Vol., 1952) volume 51, and (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 51.
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