[sun surfer]

I've plowed ahead with the audiobook, despite it being one of the hardest listens I've ever attempted, up there with my listens of Les Miserables and Dune. This one was so difficult because of all the formal names and nicknames and also because especially the first half of the book scenes just traipse from side characters to side characters here and there. I'm already having a hard time with the names, and then with the characters from scene to scene switching so often and having to try and figure if any of these characters are supposed to be ones I should already know or brand new, well... it was definitely a test of my listening and cognitive skills.

After a few hundred pages, I did make use of two similar online sites- sparknotes and schmoop. These are sites that summarise famous books chapter by chapter, I suppose usually for students. But they really helped me make more sense of the first hundred pages or so and make some character connections I hadn't while listening. I had meant to continue reading them after each section but only used them to make sense of those first few chapters so far.

I read War and Peace a long time ago when I was still a teenager. I didn't have to for school; I just wanted to, but it was a challenge being so long and dense. Though in real life I'm careful to not talk about reading it so as not to sound too pretentious, the times I felt I was around people with whom I could joke about it, I would say it's a slog for the first four or five hundred pages, but then it gets really good for the last thousand, heh.

In a way I feel the same about Dr. Zhivago, even though it's much shorter than the Tolstoy (though it's strange to say a 650 page book is 'much shorter', lol). There's so much set up, and it takes so long to get to know the characters sufficiently to be involved with them since there's so much flitting around. But once I did finally get comfortable with them all, I got really into it. For the Pasternak, that happened sometime after halfway or maybe even 2/3, maybe 300 or 400 pages in or so. In fact I know the scene where I can say I got really into the book. I'll put it in spoiler tags since it sounds like some of you might not be there yet and it's a bit of a spoiler on some minor characters:

Spoiler:

After Zhivago has been kidnapped into the forest army, there is a scene where he sees a beautiful rowan tree by a cliff or steep drop off, and a little later it is there that a mass execution is carried out of conspirators and moonshiners. All that is when the something clicked and the book became 'really good' from then on to me.

I'm still reading, though I'm about 85% done and expect to finish in the next few days. And speaking of all the nicknames and characters and having a hard time with it, I only just realised I'd missed a major character connection much earlier that made me laugh since it was such an important one to miss. I'll also put it in spoilers:

Spoiler:

There is the scene on the train near the early/middle part of the book where Zhivago is taken to the officer where he may have been ordered executed, but the officer 'Strelnikov' (not sure of the spelling since I'm listening) instead lets him go with a severe warning. I've only just now at the end of the book realised that Strelnikov is Lara's husband. When he comes back to the house where Zhivago is alone at and they finally meet (again), I was about knocked off my feet when I realised it was Lara's husband Pasha that could have executed Zhivago and didn't. In fact, I'm still wondering if I was supposed to have been able to make that connection or not earlier, since there are scenes throughout the book where the author takes advantage of us not being able to see the characters and purposely hides their identities in the scene until a specific moment.