My friend Don Brown on War and Peace: "What makes Tolstoy the lord of realist fiction is that he knows that what 'everyone' feels is what convention dictates they feel, but that what each individual feels is what their own natures dictate."

I've been looking at War and Peace as my epic for this summer (after the Aeneid last summer), and Don happens to be reading it, too, which definitely makes me much more likely to choose it!