A Certain Slant of Light

I was telling my father that a bunch of my friends were reading War & Peace, and he said that it was a book that was both absorbing and eminently put-downable. He said he used to keep it by his bed and read a little, and that sometimes he'd get out of the habit for days and even weeks, but then he'd go back to it with pleasure. We were both musing that it was written with a whole different expectation for how a book is read than is common nowadays (though even at the time it was an outlier of a book).