War and Peace slow read hits Day 101

A Substack reading group devoted to *War and Peace* reached Day 101 on April 11, marking more than 100 straight days of a chapter-a-day read through 2026. (footnotesandtangents.substack.com) The project is run by Simon Haisell through Footnotes and Tangents, which bills the 2026 program as a year-long slow read of Leo Tolstoy’s novel with one chapter assigned each day. The site says the daily option added for 2026 includes a chapter summary, footnotes, tangents, and a link to a chat thread. (footnotesandtangents.substack.com) Haisell’s November 28, 2025 invitation said the novel has 361 chapters and that readers would also get a weekly Wednesday post covering the previous seven chapters, plus comments and discussion. The same invitation said the read-along had been run before and was being re-run again in 2026. (footnotesandtangents.substack.com) That structure turns a book often treated as a doorstop into a calendar project: one chapter a day instead of a sprint through more than 300 chapters. Project Gutenberg’s text shows how sprawling the novel is, with books, parts, and a long table of contents that runs across the whole Napoleonic-era story. (gutenberg.org) Footnotes and Tangents has built more than a reading list around that pace. Its War and Peace section describes the daily email as an “optional extra,” while the site’s podcast page says the weekly audio show offers summaries, discussion, footnotes, and tangents for the same year-long read. (footnotesandtangents.substack.com 1) (footnotesandtangents.substack.com 2) The invitation post also said readers could meet in comments and in a dedicated chat thread for each chapter, with links from the reading schedule and discussion posts. In that post, Haisell said he had run worldwide book groups over the previous three years and called *War and Peace* the first slow read he had returned to each year. (footnotesandtangents.substack.com) By Day 101, the daily archive was still posting new entries in April, showing the project had moved well past its opening weeks and into the middle stretch that usually tests long-form reading habits. The archive page surfaced recent April posts in sequence, indicating the chapter-by-chapter schedule was continuing day after day. (footnotesandtangents.substack.com) The milestone does not end the project; it underlines its premise. If the schedule holds, readers still have hundreds of pages and months to go before Tolstoy’s 361-chapter march reaches its final day. (footnotesandtangents.substack.com)