I listened to the audio book version of War and Peace. I think it was something like 25-30 hours. The audio format helped keep the pace going and also it helped with the names. Although for some things, the audio format made it harder to look up in the dictionary, like I kept hearing agitant instead of adjutant, so that part didn't make sense in a lot of the military scenes. I agree with the parent that the book was very engaging, parts even felt like I was watching a movie, e.g. the drunken party tying a bear to a police officer, the foxhunt scene, the duel, the battles like when Petya gets shot, and the burning of Moscow. I even liked the abstract ending when Tolstoy relates human history to calculus so that each individual person has an infinitesimal but real contribution to history.