War and Peace: advice

My 75 year old father is obsessed with War and Peace. He's been trying to get me to read it for decades. I've started it several times and always had difficulty. I'm trying one last time, and this I'm going to try and get through the audio book.

Basically, does anyone have any advice for getting through War and Peace? It's 61 hours on audible. Any advice is helpful. It's always so dense and long and boring, and I don't much about that era of Russia/ the Napoleonic war. And there are several hundred characters from what I understand?