War and Peace

War and Peace earns its reputation as the novel intimidating readers avoid and the one they're almost always wrong to avoid — yes, it runs past 580,000 words and tracks five families and hundreds of named characters through Napoleon's invasion of Russia, but Tolstoy never loses the thread of any single person's interior life inside that scale. Virginia Woolf called it the greatest of all novels, and 150 years on nobody's mounted a serious rebuttal. Where Don Quixote invented the form, this is the novel that proved how far it could go.