War and Peace

It would be truly impossible to write anywhere near a cogent set of thoughts on the complexity of the experience reading this book. It’s like being exposed to a new color for the first time. It’s at once the best of an exhaustive non-fiction history, scientific and philosophical volume combined with one of the greatest novels of all time, and that still goes nowhere near a description of what Tolstoy achieved from the decade-long toil of writing this book.

What you cannot prepare yourself for before reading War and Peace is the (welcome) level of linguistic and narrative density. It’s like running an ultramarathon through a Southeast Asian jungle with a pickaxe. Every single page has world-class prose, a deep investigation of human nature and its inherent ironies, and throwaway lines (like calling war “a tournament of courage”) that would themselves in another context make many writer’s careers.

This translation, with its wonderful introduction, was good. I searched through a few possible versions and found this one the best.