War and peace
 

I've came across "war and peace" by Leo Tolstoy(the book costed 25 c).
Usually fiction bores me, but I've always been interested in military history, and since Tolstoy was a veteran of the Crimean war,I figured it had to have some kind of basis in reality so I decided to buy it.

I was wondering what you quiet professionals that read it taught about "War and peace" and if I made a good choice about buying it?

Thanks for bringing back some unpleasant memories from my college days. I had the misfortune of reading both War and Peace and Anna Karenina during the same semester in a Russian Lit class. Something about Russina writers makes it impossible for then to write a novel less than a 1000 pages. Some people enjoy the minute details in Tolstoy's work I found it very, very tedious.

As a work of fiction there are much better alternatives if you are interested in ficitional military novels than Tolstoy. Hemmingway immediately comes to mind. You might like Tolstoy or you may get 400 pages in to it and want to kill yourself. In that case his books make a good door stop.