There is a warmth of a good absorbing story or book whenever I read something by Tolstoy. Long comforting sentences, which wrap the story around you like a blanket. Perhaps such writings are best which communicate to you without you letting know consciously about anything. Just complete absorption with the narrative; the way life is. Just that a book lends a completely new world to you. Some of the golden moments of reading!
It begins so:
"Despite the best efforts of people congregating in hundreds of thousands on one small spot to disfigure the land they had squeezed on to, despite their clogging the land with stones to make sure nothing could grow, despite their elimination of every last grass shoot, despite the fumes from coal and oil, despite the lopping of trees and the driving out of animals and birds, spring was still spring, even in the city...."
...It happens to be spring-summer in my hemisphere.
**
Later: Still in Book 1. Some 180 pages in I come across a chapter which is not story but the writer's take on the world. And I disagree. So giving the book a pause. But apart from it, it is like other Tolstoy books, it carries you along on the reading journey until something jarring like this comes up.
