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In case I slow down on my Tolstoy assignment I just have to think of the books I have lined up.

I love books set in strange schools, having come from one myself. There’s Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh. And The Catcher In The Rye, one-third boarding school, two-thirds escape from boarding school. And speaking of The Catcher In The Rye:

A new biography by the guy who does the Dead Caulfields website. Nice photo of J.D., he looks so urbane. There’s a line in the Glass family stories about someone who looks like he’s smoking three cigarettes at once. And another line about someone who’s holding a cigarette as if he needs it for ballast.

Last year I read Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli and realized that I need to pay more attention to graphic novels. I read the first chapter of Daytripper: Bam! Can’t wait to continue.

Dammit why can’t I draw?

I have it on good authority that local sales of graphic novels have multiplied—a heartening development, since they’re not cheap.

All of these titles are available at National Bookstores.

Esquire talks style with the England Rugby Team from esquireuk on Vimeo.

The Weekly STET is brought to you by Brewhuh.

Who are the lookalikes?

Ned Stephenson of the Philippine Volcanoes rugby team and actor Matt Damon, or

Ned Stephenson and Twilight werewolf Taylor Lautner?

Or none of the above?

Who is Ned Stephenson’s rightful doppelganger? Let us know when you find him. By the way, no perving; Ned is a teenager.

Petersburg. Screen grabs from War and Peace, the five-disc epic by Sergei Bondarchuk.

Why did I wait so long to read War and Peace?? It’s amazing.

Prince Andrei Nikolaevich Bolkonsky (Andrei) and Count Pyotr Kirillovich Bezukhov (Pierre)

The haste and confusion in the hours before battle, the skittishness of the troops in the rear in contrast to the calm excitement of the men at the front lines, the strange exhilaration in the face of death, I have two words for Tolstoy’s scenes of war.

YOU’RE THERE.

In his first battle Nikolai Rostov (Such an idealist–I fear for him) is more concerned about not looking scared than surviving. “Rostov…stopped on the bridge, not knowing what to do with himself. There was no one to cut down (as he had always pictured battle to himself), nor could he help set fire to the bridge, because, unlike the other soldiers, he had not brought a plait of straw with him. He was standing and looking about, when suddenly there was a rattling on the bridge, as if someone had spilled nuts, and one of the hussars, the one nearest him, fell on the railing with a groan.”

Amidst the cannonade, a sound “as if someone had spilled nuts.” Genius.

Pierre, now very very rich, goes courting. It’s a formality.

The difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the one that jumps out at me, is that Dostoevsky is more of an obsessive. He gets into a character’s head and he just goes on and on and on until you want to yell at him and slap him around. A flaming neurotic (I can relate). Tolstoy is also obsessive—note all the “superfluous” detail—but he’s kinder to the reader, he paints the big picture for us. So Dostoevsky goes inwards: into the brain, into the nerves, into the synapses, and often he gets stuck in a loop, going round and round like crazy people. Tolstoy goes outwards into the whole wide world. Just a first impression, I could be off.

How many are left in our Reading Support Group and how far have you gotten? How do you like it so far? Leave us a note in Comments.

Saturday night we went to Art in the Park at Salcedo Village, Makati.

It’s the annual art fair where everything goes for under Php20,000.

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