This spring, I visited the British Museum with my family. We stopped by their display of cuneiform tablets, and I pulled out my phone. I opened up War and Peace, held it up, and damned if Campbell wasn’t right. Five thousands years ago, humanity’s crazy adventure with writing began with us holding something small in our hands, waiting for the text to speak to us, trying to still our minds long enough to listen to the voice of another. That part, it seems, hasn’t changed.

Reading huge works of literature on tiny devices we hold in one hand may seem odd. But in another sense it’s just like the beginnings of writing itself.

The phone offered other delights that paper couldn’t. Midway through the book, voice dictation on the iPhone started to get really, really good. I’d been doing a lot of highlighting while reading Tolstoy, saving my favorite sentences and passages. I wasn’t writing a lot of marginalia because typing on the phone broke my flow a bit too much. But once the voice dictation became fluid, I quickly discovered I could highlight a cool passage and then dash off a paragraph of my own observations, dictating it like Henry James to his secretaries. I started talking to the book — or rather, talking to Siri’s servers, which were transcribing my speech (and, unnervingly, saving copies of everything I say for two years. The audio of my rambling thoughts about Tolstoy are still out there in the aether.).

When I click on Twitter or, say, the Asphalt 6 driving game, I have a mental orientation that says “Hey! Let me entertain myself, enliven my brain, take a break, and maybe find something funny.” But when I clicked on War and Peace, I felt myself assume a kabuki seriousness: I shall now immerse myself in a Work of Art.

It looks very much like War and Peace did on my phone. This is what’s known as the “octavo” format, and it was a very popular way to print books in the 18th century.

After a month of swiping through Tolstoy on my phone, I confronted something I’d gradually been realizing for years: Phones are an awfully ugly place to experience books. They do not have the gorgeous aesthetics of printed works. At least not yet.

In war, nobody is in control, though everyone likes to pretend they are. This, I gradually realized, is Tolstoy’s main “point,” such as there is a main one, in War and Peace: That huge forces — politics, ego, money, vanity — sweep up and drag nations and people along to conflict, and the powers that be are merely carried along for the ride

But suddenly, War and Peace clicked for me.

I used to enjoy alerts; but with War and Peace, I shut them all down

These days, Tolstoy’s phone-book-sized epic is often invoked as a sort of intellectual Turing Test for deep reading: Make it to the end, and you get your Deep Literary Concentration Prize!

I wanted to find out. So I did an experiment. I pulled out my iPhone and downloaded the hugest, weightiest tome I could think of.