War and Peace

Tolstoy's colossus follows five aristocratic families through Napoleon's wars with Russia, from the glittering salons of 1805 to the burning of Moscow and beyond. At its heart are three unforgettable people: Pierre Bezukhov, the awkward, searching heir to an enormous fortune; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, brilliant and proud, looking for glory and finding something else on the field at Austerlitz; and Natasha Rostova, whose growth from impulsive girl to grown woman is one of the most fully realized lives in all of fiction. Around them Tolstoy deploys hundreds of characters, two emperors, and history itself, which he argues, in essayistic interludes, is made not by great men but by the sum of countless ordinary wills.

Its reputation as a mountain scares people off, which is a shame, because chapter by chapter it is astonishingly readable, gossip, hunts, duels, balls, battles. Audio is honestly the great cheat code here: at sixty-plus hours it simply becomes a season of your commute, and the names sort themselves out when you hear them. Few listening projects pay off like this one.

At roughly 559,900 words, War and Peace runs about 62 hours at 1x narration speed. That figure is an estimate based on a typical narration pace. The exact length depends on the voice and the playback speed you choose.

War and Peace is in the public domain, so the complete text is free on Project Gutenberg and LoudReader has the entire Project Gutenberg catalog built in. To listen:

1. Download LoudReader for Mac or iPhone (free, no account).
2. Search for “War and Peace” in the built-in catalog and add it to your library.
3. Press play. A natural offline voice reads the book while each word highlights on screen, and your place is saved between sessions.

LoudReader reads with natural offline voices, so the whole book works on a plane or underground. It is fully on-device and private, your library never leaves your device. Listening is unlimited on the free tier.