As I often stress in my writing workshops, reading as a writer is a radically different endeavor than reading to be entertained or, say, for your term paper for Race, Class & Gender in Russian Literature.

Now you can get a concrete idea of what I mean: the blog Reading Tolstoy's War & Peace: A Novelist's Notes, which stands as an archive, is my exercise in reading as a writer.

Although anyone with a brain in their cranium and a high school education will have heard of Tolstoy and his epic novel, few of even the most exquisitely educated have actually read it because it is... beyond... humungous. (Read about how I cut it in half with scissors.) So why go for it? To experience one of the reputed great works of Western culture; to check it off the bucket list (my 2011 New Year's Resolution); and, as Mallory said of Mt. Everest, "Because it's there." But more: as a writer, to learn from its successes and failures, for there are both in abundance.