War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869
No other novel contains more living people. Tolstoy's ambition was nothing less than reality itself: love, war, philosophy, history, family, all rendered at full scale. The book you always mean to read, and when you finally do, it surprises you by being warmer, funnier, and more intimate than its reputation suggests.
The case against
Tolstoy keeps stopping his own novel to lecture on the theory of history, then appends a second epilogue that is forty pages of theory with no characters in it at all. Natasha's fate in the first epilogue reads like a punishment the author mistook for a reward. The Rostovs and Bolkonskys are worth everything; the historian keeps elbowing them offstage.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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