Bite-Sized Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace are considered two of the greatest novels ever written, but they are both door stoppers coming in at about 800 and 1200 pages respectively.

Turns out Tolstoy wrote a number of novellas and short stories that allow you to get a bite-sized taste of Tolstoy in a single 1-2 hour sitting instead of wading through weeks or months of the full novels. I read Peaver & Volokhonsky's (P&V) excellent translations of these works (available in a collection) and they are incredibly entertaining, thought provoking and moving, giving you those deep Russian thoughts that linger hours or days after reading.

Tolstoy wrote over a dozen, with several published after his death, and here is my short, ranked list of what I consider the best pieces worth an hour or two of your time if you want a taste of Tolstoy.  As usual translation matters and I recommend finding the P&V:

• The Death of Ivan Ilyich – This is Tolstoy’s best-known novella, and an incredibly piercing commentary of the process of dying for both the person dying as well as those around him.  This especially hit home after watching my father on his death bed, and coming darn close to my own death bed after a bike accident a year ago.  Tolstoy covers things like envy of the healthy, getting lost in work to avoid the reality death, and the deception that most of us have that death happens to other people, but not really to us.

• Master and Man – The first half of this story makes you think you are in a version of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”, with two men facing freezing in the snow.  It ends up in a completely different place that literally brought tears to my eyes.  A very moving story.

• The Kreutzer Sonata – This starts off with some shocking (for late 19th century) statements on marriage and sex that got the story briefly censored in Russia and an attempted censor in the US, then settles into a love-triangle that could be easily adapted for a modern telenovela.  The Kreutzer Sonata is a real Beethoven piece that has an amazing first movement, the raw passion of the music making the husband convinced there is something up between his wife and her accompanying music instructor.  A very entertaining read, with the exposition on sex and marriage interesting for its time.

• The Devil – Fascinating psychological drama that explores the Madonna-Whore complex twenty years before Freud wrote on it.  The story’s conflict between love and lust is amazingly portrayed, but its two endings - a sort of “choose-your-own-adventure” that goes in two directions – both fell flat for me, and a little disappointing after the amazing set-up.  Still worth an hour read to see Tolstoy’s amazing psychological insights.

Don Quixote: A One-Joke Story That Didn’t Need a Sequel

As part of my retirement journey through the “world-books educated people should read,” I took a break from the serious, introspective Russians for what I expected would be lighter fare: Don Quixote (DQ).

Like a lot of famous literature, DQ has seeped into public consciousness in simplified form: the crazy guy tilting at windmills with his sidekick Sancho Panza. That image is in the book, but that modern shorthand owes more to musical and movie Man of La Mancha and “The Impossible Dream” than to the novel itself (the musical is a derivative of DQ, not the actual story). The actual novel is two books, published ten years apart, and usually presented together.

Here’s what I expected and what I found.

• It’s about a crazy guy tilting at windmills. Sort of. The famous episode happens, but it’s brief. The real premise is that Quixote reads so many chivalric romances he loses his grip on reality and sets out as a knight-errant to perform great deeds and win an idealized woman. Think of a modern person so deep into online content that they can't distinguish content from reality.  That's Don Quixote. 

What surprised me was how meta Cervantes gets. When Quixote’s friends try to cure his craziness by burning his library, they review real books of the period, including Cervantes’s own, and criticize them. In Part 2, the first book has been published inside the fictional world, so the characters meet people who have read about them and discuss their own literary fame. For a novel written four hundred years ago, that felt surprisingly modern.

• It’ll be translated from archaic Spanish into archaic English. Nope. Edith Grossman’s translation, with its footnotes, is outstanding. The prose feels natural and modern, and the notes explain the history and literary jokes. If you’re going to read DQ, this is the version I’d recommend.

• It’s long. Yes, and this is my biggest complaint. The two parts (at over 700 pages) amount to a one-joke story that eventually loses steam. Cervantes has a central comic premise: Quixote doing crazy things to which Sancho makes earthy, often malapropistic comments that are funny yet insightful. He keeps varying it until the joke wears thin. 
  Critics often call Part 2 a deeper look at their relationship, with Sancho growing beyond the straight-man role. I can see that, but I got bored, so rushed through large chunks of Part 2. If you want to try DQ, my recommendation is to read the first part and then decide whether you want more. For me the sequel was more than I needed.

• Four hundred years ago will feel like ancient history. Not really. Cervantes was writing in the early seventeenth century, around Shakespeare’s time, but the book reads like normal people dealing with the problems of their day: wars, political instability, piracy. The translation and footnotes help, and the human condition underneath feels familiar.

• Cervantes Takes Too Many Side Quests. The first part contains novella “stories within the story” that temporarily leave Quixote and Sancho behind. Readers have complained about these diversions since Part 1 was published, and Cervantes himself acknowledges their criticism in the sequel when characters discuss the reception of the first book.

I found the inserted stories interesting, and they provided a welcome change of pace from the central routine of Quixote's delusions and their consequences.

So, is Don Quixote a Great Book?

From a historical standpoint as the “first modern novel”, yes, especially with the meta commentary and experimentation that anticipated later styles. I found Sancho’s muddled wisdom amusing and there are several laugh-out-loud scenes (like Quixote attacking a puppet show, convinced the little figurines are real people in need of rescue). So the main story is funny, surprisingly contemporary, and remarkably self-aware, but it gave me more laughs than deep things to think about.

I still prefer the intellectual and spiritual depth of the Russian Greats I’ve been reading, so I’d rank DQ much lower on the list of “Great Books” versus professional scholars who often put it in the top ten.

“Apocalypse Now” Is Not Joseph Conrad

Few people know of Joseph Conrad these days, and if someone remembers anything vaguely about him, it is probably that his novella Heart of Darkness was the inspiration for the movie Apocalypse Now.

I was in my early 50s before I read Heart myself. My kid was assigned it in high-school lit, and I picked it up after the assignment was complete and it was unceremoniously discarded on the living-room bookshelf.

“Narrow read,” I thought. “This will take no time.  Interesting to see how it matches the movie.”

It didn’t.  The movie is, let’s say, remotely related to the book, rather like how the movie Clueless is based on Austen’s Emma (sure, if you say so.)

But the bigger surprise was that Conrad’s prose was simply astounding, and requires careful reading to digest properly. Like a big porterhouse, you have to take small bites - chew, swallow, clear the palate - before taking the next bite, both to savor the flavor and to be able to digest it.

That slim read took longer than I thought, as I both savored the reading and its digestion.

Enjoying the novella so much, I just circled around to read Conrad’s full-length novel, published in 1900, Lord Jim.

Again, the prose is amazing. It is layered, almost poetic, and requires a deliberate reading pace, often requiring you to go back and reread previous paragraphs to get the full meaning.

For example, here is a passage:

He became first mate…without ever having been tested by those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not only to others but also to himself.

That sentence is difficult not because of the vocabulary, which is ordinary. It’s difficult because Conrad makes you hold the whole grammatical structure in your head while he keeps adding additional layers.

It starts simply enough:

“...without ever having been tested by those events of the sea...”

And then he tells you what those events reveal:

“...that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man...”

Then he keeps digging:

“the edge of his temper”

“the fibre of his stuff”

“the quality of his resistance”

And then deeper still:

“the secret truth of his pretences”

And finally:

“not only to others but also to himself.”

That last clause shifts the message from whether a man is brave or cowardly as he is tested by the sea to whether his conception of himself is actually true.

Now, this sort of reading isn’t for everyone in 21st-century TikTok world. Some of Lord Jim required reading the next page, going back and reading the previous one, then continuing from where I’d left off, a sort of two pages forward, one page back. That isn’t for everyone.

But the amazing prose, combined with themes of guilt, shame, redemption and self-definition, is wrapped inside an incredibly interesting South Pacific adventure story. And underneath it all is  Conrad’s question of how well a man can really know himself, and what happens when reality doesn't match the person he thought he was.

In the end, I recommend experiencing Conrad sometime in your life, Hear of Darkness the appetizer for someone who isn't sure they want the whole steak, Lord Jim for the full meal, if you're willing to take the time to savor it.

A Deal with the Devil Against Boredom

Popular culture has absorbed the concept of the “Faustian bargain,” even if few people know the term. The basic Faustian plot has the main character (Faust, or Dr. Faustus) trading his soul to the devil in return for fame, riches, or power. The story then explores what those things do to him, usually discovering that what he thought he wanted doesn't live up to what he imagined. Eventually the story arrives at the inevitable climax of how Faust can wiggle out of his end of the bargain.

The plot has sunk into the common consciousness and has appeared in everything from a Simpsons Halloween episode to movies such as The Devil's Advocate and Bedazzled, and even in songs, with a variation of the theme in “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

Interestingly, in Goethe's version of Faust (multiple writers have picked up the theme over the centuries) his protagonist doesn't make the bargain because he wants riches or fame. Instead he makes a deal with the devil because he is bored.

More precisely, Goethe’s Faust is so dissatisfied with the limits of ordinary human existence that he contemplates suicide.  Mephistopheles, sensing an opportunity, offers him the chance to experience everything life has to offer. So Faust bets his soul that Mephistopheles still won’t be able to give him a moment satisfying enough that he’d want it to last forever.

Goethe’s meandering two-part play then has Mephistopheles throwing the obvious temptations at him like lust, riches, power. Faust is “meh,” until he finally finds something that does matter to him: the possibility of creating something lasting and beneficial for mankind, something that will outlive him. After that, the rest of the story becomes what happens after Faust is no longer bored and has found something worth living for, and how he escapes his end of the bargain.

Two hundred years later, Goethe’s book is pedantic, strange, and pretty obscure. So what struck me when reading it in the 21^st century was not Faust, the various inducements, or even Mephistopheles, who is often more interesting than the protagonist. It was the existential boredom that made a deal with the devil possible.

And my first thought reading this was that current generations have made their own modern Faustian bargain against boredom. And the devil today is of course the smartphone in your pocket. And a lot of people have given up living real lives in return for not feeling bored.

Waiting in line? Phone.

Commercial break? Phone.

Can’t fall asleep? Phone.

Eating lunch alone? Phone.

Feeling lonely, restless, or vaguely dissatisfied? Phone.

Do that long enough and you start training yourself to expect something interesting every few seconds. Ordinary life begins to feel empty and creates a negative feedback loop of filling that emptiness with more internet time. The more often you use constant stimulation to escape boredom, loneliness, or uncomfortable thoughts, the less capable you become of simply sitting with those things. Which makes you reach for the stimulation even faster the next time.

Now I use the internet every day. The question isn’t whether someone uses it, or browses, or goes on social media. The question is how much of a life is spent there, and what you do the moment you aren’t being actively entertained.

I was in my late 30s before the internet was ubiquitous, so I seem largely immune to selling my soul for online nirvana. And I’m still conscious of not using the internet during idle time. I’m the guy in line at the grocery store not looking at his phone, instead looking at everything around me and wondering: how long has the cashier worked here? Is this a career or a part-time job? Do employees get a discount? 

That kind of idle noticing used to be the default. For society at large, and especially for younger generations with no memory of pre-internet and no practice sitting with boredom, I don’t know how society teaches it back.

The internet isn’t going away. Other than people like me setting an example of living outside it, and posting observations like this that maybe ten people will read, there may not be a neat solution.

The old stories obsess over how Faust gets out of the contract. The modern version may be bleaker because if all of society progresses to where it can’t bear three minutes without stimulation, there doesn’t need a Mephistopheles to come collect. 

War and Peace: Yes, It Should Be on Your Bucket Reading List

My retirement as a “gentleman squire” has included learning classical piano and getting around to reading those Great Works of Literature I never had time to read while working. I actually did a pretty good job of tackling Crime and Punishment, Paradise Lost and a few other classics while still in the work trenches, but I was overwhelmed the first time I tried Tolstoy, and waited until retirement to give him another try.

There are thousands of reviews by learned scholars out there, so I'll focus on a layman's review: what I expected from the book's reputation versus what it was actually like to read.

It’s Long!

Yes, it is! But here’s the interesting part: there is rarely a chapter over ten minutes long. It is basically a collection of A LOT of short chapters, so it isn't like you have to carve out hours at a time to read it. You can actually read one or two chapters at a time for 15 minutes a day and get through it in a couple of months.

There Are Hundreds of Characters!

Not quite true. There are about ten major characters and another two dozen or so who support them. The “hundreds” mostly come from the historical figures who drift in and out of the story. Some you already know, like Napoleon. Others you get to know as you go, particularly the Russian and French military leadership. And then there are lots of politicians, generals and other historical figures mentioned literally once in passing.

There is no need to keep a cheat sheet.

The harder part is the Russian names. People can have a formal name, a social name, and a diminutive used in personal circumstances. So Andrey Nikolayevich, Prince Andrey, and Andryusha are all the same person. I will admit that reading The Brothers Karamazov first made this much easier as this naming convention was drilled into my head with that reading experience. 

It’s About Napoleon’s Invasion and Retreat from Russia!

Well, the back half of the book is, and that is where I found it most interesting.

The first half sets up all the characters through a lot of social and parlor settings, along with the events leading up to the Russian invasion. Some of that was mildly interesting, some of it was downright funny, and some of the romance and high-society drama dragged.

But the book has a sort of “Forrest Gump” quality to it. It follows a relatively small group of Russian aristocrats who go out into the world and keep running into major historical events and people. One character meets Napoleon, another meets the Russian Czar, another major military figures. These fictional people are essentially wandering through actual history.

That was one of my favorite aspects of the book. The historical scenes and battles are what really made it for me, although I did feel a bit bogged down in the salon and romance drama between Austerlitz and Napoleon’s invasion, including an extended hunting scene and Christmas scene.  But hey, "Peace" is in the title too.

Tolstoy Goes Off on History Lectures!

This is true.

“Professor Tolstoy” makes periodic appearances to expound on his theory of history, rejecting the “Great Man” arguments that had grown up around Napoleon. Tolstoy argues, essentially, that great historical events emerge from the actions of countless individuals and circumstances rather than being directed by a single extraordinary figure.

These side diversions reminded me a bit of the whale-lecture chapters in Moby-Dick. They are mildly interesting and often fairly short, although the second Epilogue which ends the book, and after the story ends, is a different matter. It is a lengthy philosophical essay that I admit I mostly skimmed.

You Need an Encyclopedia to Read It!

True, but that was half the fun, and it is much easier with the internet these days.

During the battle scenes, I literally had something like a 5:1 Wikipedia-to-book ratio as I went down historical rabbit holes.

“Who was this general?”

“What happened to him after the war? OMG, he was executed?!”

“What do modern historians say about Austerlitz?”

“What do they say about Borodino?”

And so on.

The book basically incited me to do deep historical reading on the Napoleonic Wars, what led up to them, and their aftermath. I ended up learning as much about the actual history surrounding the novel as I did from the novel itself. Totally fascinating, but again, I am a retired guy without a job, and I understand that at this stage of life one either gets into military history or smoking meats.

And Then There’s Pierre

Besides the war history, I found the moral struggles and life arc of Pierre, one of the major characters, extremely fascinating. His story gives you the existential Russian literature experience you expect, although not quite on the scale of Dostoyevsky.

And that may ultimately be what surprised me most about the book. I went into War and Peace expecting an enormous historical epic about Napoleon and Russia. I got that, but I also got a novel about people trying to figure out what the hell they are supposed to do with their lives.

Overall, a very enjoyable read, with some patience required here and there and a calendar commitment. At roughly 1,500 pages, plus all the fascinating encyclopedia research it inspired, it is certainly a major project.

But yes: War and Peace belongs on the bucket reading list, but I rank it below Dostoyevsky's two major novels and better than Anna Karenina, but read that one first to get your Tolstoy training wheels.

Anna Karenina Review: Anna's Story Provides the Drama, Levin's Journey Provides the Meaning.

Upon retiring 18 months ago I entered my "Russian Literature Stage," starting with The Brothers Karamazov (amazing) and, after a needed mental break, deciding to next read Anna Karenina as "Tolstoy training wheels" before tackling War and Peace. As with all foreign literature, I did a lot of research on the best translation and settled on the Bartlett translation from Oxford World Classics, which has excellent footnotes. I also used my favorite AI during the reading as a study guide for Russian history, nineteenth-century culture, and even as a sounding board whenever I ran into surprising plot twists or shocking dialogue I just had to share, sort of a digital book club companion.

Now I had certainly heard of the book and knew it regularly appeared on lists of the greatest novels ever written, but I knew absolutely nothing about the plot. I went in completely blind, so I had no clue what to expect. After wading through over 100 pages without the title character even appearing, I was quickly pulled into the primary storyline, a love triangle with all the spiciness of a telenovela.

The novel is psychologically extraordinary. Tolstoy's greatest gift is making me sympathize with people I often disagreed with. I found myself feeling sorry for the jilted husband Karenin despite his coldness, understanding Anna despite increasingly disagreeing with her choices, recognizing her lover Vronsky's growing sense of entrapment, and ultimately admiring the secondary protagonist Levin's earnest search for meaning. Very few novels have left me feeling compassion for nearly everyone while also acknowledging that each contributed to the tragedy.

What surprised me most, however, was not the affair but the structure. I expected a novel called Anna Karenina to center on the title character from beginning to end. Instead, she doesn't appear for over 100 pages, and after she departs the novel, Tolstoy spends roughly another 100 pages without any of the love triangle participants at all. At first this felt strange, but I suspect it reflects Tolstoy's larger point: individual tragedy does not stop the world, the world simply moves on.

The secondary protagonist Levin ultimately became the character I related to most. His tendency to enjoy life while living it, but despair when trying to intellectually deconstruct it, felt remarkably familiar. His struggles with mortality, faith, and meaning resonated deeply, particularly following my own experiences with a near-fatal accident, the sudden death of my brother, and more recently waiting for medical test results.

Anna's mental decline was equally impressive. Rather than presenting madness as a sudden break, Tolstoy shows an intelligent mind gradually becoming trapped within its own interpretations. Her stream of consciousness near the end felt strikingly modern, anticipating the literary style of James Joyce by more than half a century.

My one criticism of the book is the frequent "side quests" Tolstoy takes into subjects that clearly interested him and probably his readers at a time when there wasn't an endless stream of entertainment competing for their attention. There are long passages on farming, hunting, Russian politics, and current events such as a conflict involving the Ottoman Empire, all of which became eye-glazing. While many of these sections enriched my understanding of nineteenth-century Russia and ultimately served larger thematic purposes, I often found myself wishing for a firmer editorial hand.

Comparing it with The Brothers Karamazov, I found Dostoevsky's novel the more compelling reading experience. Dostoevsky openly wrestles with philosophy and religion through dramatic confrontation. Tolstoy embeds those same questions within everyday life. Anna Karenina often resembles a domestic drama or nineteenth-century soap opera on the surface while quietly exploring profound questions underneath. I admired that subtlety, though I responded more immediately to Dostoevsky's directness.

Overall, I understand why Anna Karenina is considered one of the greatest novels ever written, although I would currently rank it below any Dostoevsky I've read (including Crime and Punishment). We'll see where Tolstoy ultimately lands after I finish War and Peace. Anna Karenina is less interested in telling a story than in recreating an entire world and exploring how ordinary lives contain extraordinary moral and psychological depth.

Ironically, the novel's central love triangle was what kept me reading. I kept guessing where the drama was headed and never got it right. But it was Levin's quiet spiritual awakening that stayed with me after I closed the book. In other words, Anna's story provides the drama, while Levin's journey provides the meaning.

Proust "In Search of Lost Time", Book 1 ("Swann's Way") Review

Following is an AI generated review of the first book (of 7) of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", considered one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written.  I used the AI as a study guide asking questions, digging into subjects, getting clarification or historical background, then at the end told it to generate a review based on our conversation. 

Note: Translation version is important.  If interested read the Davis one pictured.

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Reading Proust was unlike reading almost anything else. The prose is often beautiful, poetic, and packed with insight, but it can also wander for pages at a time. I found that trying to follow every sentence analytically was exhausting. The better approach was often to let the prose wash over me and allow the accumulation of impressions, observations, and images to build into something larger.

What stayed with me most was not the famous madeleine scene, but Proust's observations about memory, desire, and the symbols we create in our minds. Again and again he shows how people, places, music, and objects become invested with meanings far beyond their reality. The sections on Swann's obsession, jealousy, and eventual disillusionment were particularly powerful, at times feeling surprisingly modern in their understanding of rumination, uncertainty, projection, and self-deception.

Perhaps most remarkable were Proust's psychological insights. Writing before many modern psychological concepts had entered popular consciousness, he describes patterns of thought that feel strikingly contemporary. At various points I found myself recognizing what we might now call rumination, pathological doubt, obsessive thinking, idealization, and the tendency to construct elaborate inner worlds around people and possibilities. More than once I had the feeling that he was describing mental experiences with a precision that would not seem out of place in a modern psychology text.

I was less captivated by some of the lengthy social and aristocratic maneuvering, and there were stretches that required patience. But just when I felt Proust had drifted too far afield, he would produce a paragraph so perceptive that I had to stop and reread it.

More than a novel of events, this is a novel of consciousness. It reminded me how memory reshapes people and places, how we turn others into symbols, and how much of life is spent inhabiting worlds created by our own minds. Proust's greatest subject may not be memory itself, but the distance between reality and the meanings we attach to it. 

Challenging at times, but ultimately a rewarding read and full of insights that linger long after the book is finished.

AI as a Russian Lit Study Guide: Good, with Some Precautions

Having recently retired, I finally started my long-promised Russian Literature Phase, something I promised I would do “when I had the time.” I had read Crime and Punishment about 15 years ago and loved it, picked up Brothers Karamazov (BK) soon after, and then let it sit in my digital bookshelf for a decade and a half while I kept grabbing contemporary novels and “beach reads”, which are fun but don't challenge you.  I even read the first chapter of BK once and put it down as it just didn’t hook me like C&P did.

Now that I actually have time, I decided to give BK another shot, but the first thing I did was check the translation and found that was the issue.  The copy I bought 15 years ago was a bargain-bin 1905 Constance Garnett translation in full Victorian English. I switched to the modern Pevear/Volokhonsky translation from 1990 (same team as the C&P I enjoyed) and immediately felt the difference with a modern reading flow.  But I ended up keeping both versions open so I could compare passages and deepen my understanding.

This time around, I also used AI as a personal study guide. Dostoevsky tosses in historical, philosophical, and cultural references that a well-educated Russian in the 1880s would have understood instantly, but a modern American, even one as reasonably well-read and well-traveled as moi, might not.

For an AI study guide I found Grok was not that good.  It literally made-up quotes that were not in the book, then apologized for it when I pointed out the mistake.  And it was a little too smarmy, saying things like:

Keep going — the best 600 pages are still ahead

You’ve got this.  The baby dream is 200 pages away. It’ll break you open.

Keep going. The trial is next — and it’s brutal.

Like I was a GenZ college student who needed encouragement to finish my assignment.

ChatGPT was better, and I used it the way you’d might talk to a lit professor during office hours or at the pub, tossing theories around, digging into the psychology of the characters, and chasing down historical context. At one point I was exploring whether one of the brothers had a Madonna–Whore complex with the two major female leads.  Another time I was comparing a line from The Usual Suspects (“I don’t believe in God, but I fear him”) to a passage in BK, not something you will find in a written study guide. It even gave me crash courses on 19th-century Russian politics and Pushkin when I needed them.

All of that kept me far more engaged in the book than I would’ve been otherwise. It let me go deep into the novel’s theological and philosophical arguments which include questions about God, society, scientism, morality, and the messiness of being human. BK deals with ideas that feel like they could have been written last week instead of the 1870s. The brothers themselves read like psychological archetypes we all carry around: pure passion, pure reason, pure faith, nihilism. Dostoevsky basically anticipated the major existentialists and psychologists of the 20th century.

Ultimately it is an amazing and rewarding book, worth the time and effort. When the AI asked me the main theme I got from the book, I put the line "Love life more than the meaning of it", one of many lines and passages that hit me deeply.

So this is definitely not a “beach read”, and more like a college course that requires outside work to get its full appreciation and understanding, something I think is required of most great literature.  In this case I think AI as an interactive study guide is a great tool to help, and I will continue using it through my Russian Literature Phase.

Review: "Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic"

Now that I’m retired, I’ve gotten back into reading about a book a week, which is impressive considering I now spend half my day trying to remember where I put my reading glasses (so I strategically placed half a dozen readers around the house). 

I’ll be posting reviews whenever I stumble across something interesting, though lately I seem to be drifting heavily into history and historical fiction. Apparently this is normal as someone once told me “When you get to a certain age, you either get into smoking meats or historical wars.” 

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I read Rubicon as a historical companion to Robert Harris’s historical fiction "Cicero" books" (Harris actually recommends Rubicon himself, along with a long list of other works in the appendix). Reading Rubicon I found Harris followed “real” history quite faithfully, adding flavor here and there, of course. (Tiro, Harris’s narrator, was a real historical figure, though very little is actually known about him.) In that sense, this book feels a bit like re-reading the Cicero series (which I highly recommend) in a more condensed, purely historical form.

I do wish Holland had gone into greater detail about the major battles as he tends to gloss over them, so I’ll need to pick up a separate military history book for that. He also delves quite a bit into the psychology of ancient Rome, which, while insightful, is inevitably speculative. I liken it to someone 2,000 years from now trying to reconstruct “American psychology” from a few surviving texts: probably close to the truth, but worth taking with a grain of salt. I found he focused a bit too much on this theme in both this book and the follow-up volume I am now reading, "Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar", which covers Augustus to Nero.

That said, none of this detracts from the overall experience. Holland makes history engaging and enjoyable, enough that I wish a series like this had existed back when I was first learning about Rome in high school.