The ten most ambitious books of all time

At Collider Jeremy Urquhart tagged ten of the most ambitious (and longest) books of all time, including:

War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace feels a little in line, ambition-wise, with Les Misérables, and they were both published in the same decade, too. War and Peace involves Russian history, though, even if France does factor into the plot and some of the conflict, seeing as War and Peace takes place during the Napoleonic Wars, and there’s a similar amount of time covered in Les Misérables, going from about 1805 to 1820, rather than that previously mentioned novel’s span of 1815 to 1832.

There are stretches of War and Peace that aren’t too narrative-focused, with Leo Tolstoy using some of his 1200+ pages to unpack history and philosophical ideas, too. Like with Les Misérables, it’s all compelling and well-written, so he more than gets away with it. War and Peace is famously huge, and beyond iconic, as an epic… maybe even the ultimate epic, so here it is, trumping all the other books, and standing, arguably, as the most ambitious piece of literature of all time.

Read about another title on the list.

War and Peace appears among Boris Kachka's twenty-six best very long books, Kirsty Gunn's ten top books about unrequited love, Terry Waite's six best books, Adrian Edmondson's six best books, Robert Newman's six best books, John Cleese's six favorite books, Kate Kellaway's ten best Christmases in literature, the Telegraph's ten best historical novels, Simon Sebag Montefiore's five top books about Moscow, Oliver Ford Davies's six best books, Stella Tillyard's four favorite historical novels, Ann Shevchenko's top ten novels set in Moscow, Karl Marlantes' top ten war stories, Niall Ferguson's five most important books, Norman Mailer's top ten works of literature, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best battles in literature, ten of the best floggings in fiction, and ten of the best literary explosions.

--Marshal Zeringue