War and Peace
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 story stops dead, repeatedly, so Tolstoy can lecture. The essays on free will and historical causation are what one reader files as "Tolstoy at his stupidest," and the second epilogue is the worst offender, a treatise standing where an ending belongs. Readers who came for the war get the mirror complaint, since troop movements and command disputes are "of interest only to war historians." The cast runs to hundreds, each answering to a formal name, a patronymic, and a nickname, so lists get kept beside the sofa. Underneath sits the length: "why use one sentence when 20 pages will do," and the whole thing "could have been said with half the words." A "mishmash of fictional narrative with historical essay," and the seams show.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
