About ten years ago I was going to take a coach journey of approximately two hours. Kindles were relatively new technology back then. As well as being the proud owner of one I was also amazed at how cheaply you could download books, even classics that were still expensive in traditional physical bookstores.

One of those available was the monolithic ‘War and Peace’ which I duly downloaded. Although obviously you have always been able to see how far you have got in a book via pages read, Kindle offered a feature that expressed this as a percentage. Now the point is, I can’t promise I was reading it for every second or minute of the aforementioned two hour coach journey but I was immensely disappointed to discover on disembarking that I had completed a mere two per cent of the book.

A decade on I’ve gone through three replacement Kindles and read hundreds of books but ‘War and Peace’ has stubbornly remained untouched at two per cent complete. So, to cut a long story short it has over time become the book I never finished (barely started?) but still think about.

Checking on Google it seems the average reader would take 32 to 42 hours to finish it with the book officially spanning over half a million words. It feels a massive commitment but intriguingly has 361 chapters. That would surely make the perfect New Year resolution. One chapter a day for a year to complete.