My friend and writing buddy Glenda Funk of Idaho joined the slow readers’ group of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy for 2026. I’d read about this on a blog post by a writer in our Tuesday group and been intrigued. Sharon Roy was choosing to write a haiku after each of the 361 chapters., where readers read one chapter per day and listen to a podcast about it. The irony! War and Peace in haiku! I smiled and secretly wished I’d joined but feared I was too late. Next year, I told myself.
Then, I sent a picture of a stack of books through a text exchange asking Glenda which poetry book I should read next. Glenda is the most voracious poetry reader I know. She is a fast reader and is a good matchmaker to suggest the next book based on poets she knows her friends like and those she thinks they will enjoy next. She shared that she was still reading Instructions for Traveling West by Joy Sullivan because she is also reading War and Peace.
And that’s when it happened. Her next text had me joining a Substack group to be a slow reader this year.
Here is actual text footage of how a reader gets sucked into a challenge like War and Peace :
You know those movies where someone misses the train and has to run down the tracks and make a jump for it, praying they catch hold of the book party caboose? That was me. Instead of getting on at the station when it was pulling out on January 1, I waited until the last possible time to feasibly begin – – around 8 p.m. on January 30. Flailing hands and flying hair in a flurry of free-spiritedness like who cares if I have to read 31 chapters of War and Peace to catch up with everyone else? Like I’m some sort of reading ninja. I’m not. I have 31 chapters of War and Peace to read, and now I’m in a war zone with myself looking for some peace.
Perhaps I will use my silent reading hour this morning that I was going to use at the Silent Book Club on the Zebulon square in 1828 Coffee Company to catch up. Extreme weather caused its cancellation, so now, instead, I’ll be reading all all day at home, apparently with snow falling, by the fireplace with my own home brewed coffee in the way I always dream,. Or maybe I’ll finish Reminders of Him by Colleen Hoover, this month’s Kindred Spirits reading group pick. Or, perhaps – just perhaps – I will pick a poetry book to devour. A Bit Much by Lyndsay Rush has my eye. Let’s face it: most likely it will be all of the above.
What are you reading today?
Tossing you a snowball – stay warm!
