Books

I realise I have read nowhere near enough books to answer this definitively.

I'd say war and peace is actually the stand out, but then I know other Russian authors like dostoevsky did similar books. War and place's u illness is that tolstoy writes like a kid who doesn't realise that curtailment/limitation is a core facets of book writing - he tries and succeeds in writing the lives of many people over the course of many years; it's big. You see it and go "oh that's it? I could read that, actually." But when you sit down to read it, you're hit eith another big Ness- it's detail. Tolstoy is in no rush to get the story off it's feet. He wants you feel everything and note every detail. Live through the soiree, the mundanity, and the trauma as well as the glory at the end of the book. That's war and peace.

At the moment I'm reading Chaucer's Canterbury tales and even though it's one of the very oldest "classics" of English literature, (beaten out by beowulf and maybe something else) I think people still "sleep upon it." There's something really special about how sequenced and ordered it is, and the novel is a scherezade (a story is told within a story being told within a story). Also portrays medieval culture through the lens of medieval contempories, and it's surprisingly close to the stereotype - there's lots of crude and physical humour, adultery and the threat of physical reprisal for all manner of things. Great - maybe even essential -for learning how to effectively write medieval settings.