What it's actually like to read
Not difficult; long. The prose is direct (Tolstoy wrote to be understood), the chapters are short, and the material is dinner parties, disastrous marriages, career humiliations, and Napoleon arriving to ruin everything. The war chapters and the peace chapters alternate like seasons of a show. The famous length (around 1,200 pages, depending on edition) is a commitment of pace, not of intelligence.
The two real obstacles, solved
The names. Every character has a name, a patronymic, a surname, and two nicknames. Solution: keep the character list bookmarked for the first 100 pages, after which the five families sort themselves and the problem evaporates. The philosophy essays. Tolstoy pauses the story, notably in the second epilogue, to argue his theory of history. Permission granted by generations of readers: skim them on a first pass and return later if his ideas catch you; they caught him enough to spend his last years on A Calendar of Wisdom, which is Tolstoy's own daily-page format and this press's favorite ancestor.
Which translation
Pevear & Volokhonsky (2007) for accuracy with texture, the modern default. The Maude translation (1922, revised editions since) for smooth classic English; the Maudes knew Tolstoy, and it's the free public-domain option. Anthony Briggs (2005) for the most contemporary voice. Any of the three finishes the job; the worst translation choice is spending a month deciding.
The survival plan, and the verdict
Fifteen pages a night is War and Peace in under three months; a chapter a day (they average four pages) is the gentler year-long road, and dated daily reading is rather our specialty as a press: the habit mechanics are free here. Verdict: worth it if you want one enormous, warm, life-containing novel this decade, and there's no shame in the alternative: the under-100-pages shelf exists, and Tolstoy himself thought his best book was the short daily one. He may have been right.
Common questions
Is War and Peace hard to read?
Long, not hard: direct prose, short chapters, and story engines (love, ruin, war, inheritance) that television still runs on. The genuine obstacles are Russian naming conventions, which resolve after 100 pages with a character list, and Tolstoy's history essays, which first-time readers may skim without guilt.
How long does it take to read War and Peace?
At fifteen pages a night, about eleven weeks; at a chapter a day, roughly a year. Both plans work because the chapters are short and self-contained. The failure mode is trying to binge it like a normal novel.
Which War and Peace translation is best?
Pevear & Volokhonsky for the modern standard, Maude for classic smoothness (and free, being public domain), Briggs for the most contemporary English. All three are good; pick the sample paragraph you enjoy and stop deliberating.
What did Tolstoy think of War and Peace?
He famously grew dismissive of it, and spent his last fifteen years on A Calendar of Wisdom, a page-a-day anthology he considered his most important work. The author of the longest famous novel ended up a daily-reader man, which we take as an endorsement of the format.