After almost a year of reading this thing, here's how I feel:

It's the longest sermon I've ever seen, and it didn't have a point. The epilogue clarifies that the book was written to answer two schools of historical thought, and that neither is totally correct. If the story was 300 pages, I might have still been interested. The story was 1215 pages! Not interested anymore.

The story was fine (sometimes engaging and interesting, sometime boring and unimportant).

The constant interruption of the story for something as banal as a repeated argument about Freedom vs. Necessity was not only disruptive, but frustrating. I put the book down more than once during a lecture from Tolstoy where he was unhappy with his perception of the popular historical opinion if his time.

Not a waste of time. It probably deserves three or MAYBE four stars because of how long and difficult the road of writing it must've been. I'm giving it a two because it was four times the length that the message warranted.

-Luke who's opinion doesn't matter