Just got done with GK Chestertons “The Man who was Thursday” and now I’m starting Tolstois “War and Peace”, which I am really excited and a little intimidated by. So far mostly doing research on the period, will start reading probably tomorrow. I already read some of his older and shorter novels and hated them, Ivan Iljytch aside. I am hoping that the younger Tolstoi had smarter ideas than the misogynist religious fundamentalist of the later period.

Anyways, since I can’t speak on War and Peace yet, here is my review for Chesterton:

Chesterton crafts a humorous and thrilling mystery, plunging his readers and his hero, the poet-turned-detective Gabriel Syme, into a nightmarish chase through London and northern France as he tries to unravel a vast and sinister anarchist conspiracy. It is hard to discuss this novel without revealing too much, so I will tread carefully.
The plot starts out simple enough. Two poets meet in a park and discuss the autheticity of their anarchist beliefs. One turns out to be a detective, the other part of a real anarchist lodge. In the following 15 chapters Chesterton gradually adds layer upon layer until the story seems to have changed completely from it's point of origin, only for it to come full circle and show that our first expectations were wrong all along. The characters and the reader reach this realisation together: their assumptions have sent them on a quest that is not what it seems. How expectations and biases shape our reality is one of the book’s strongest themes, and it fits Chesterton’s obvious distrust of materialism and rationalism.
The style follows the same arc. At first the writing seems fairly conventional, apart from some comic and eccentric touches. But these grow stranger with every chapter, until the final masked ball feels closer to the ritual in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut than to a detective story.
That said, the book has clear weaknesses. Its portrayal of anarchism is hardly fair and is at best a caricature. Whenever the text talks about anarchism, it has about as much credibility as my grandmother talking about drugs: mostly sensationalist headlines with little substance. There is some critique of society, but it comes from a perspective that is not interested in fundamental questions and is fairly comfortable with the status quo. The strong religious themes won’t be to everyone’s taste, though I found that they never became preachy. There are also some parts that seem a bit repetitive, but I can understand their addition from a structural perspective.
Overall, I found this quite entertaining and fun. Chesterton is definitely very talented when it comes to writing. However, it didn’t impress me as much as I expected given its reputation. Perhaps I simply dislike cops too much to ever truly enjoy a story centered around them.