"If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy."*

A few weeks ago, I read War and Peace. I was astonished, delighted, transfigured…all the things you’re supposed to be after reading War and Peace. I loved every page, including the dozens of little digressions on the worthlessness of contemporary historians (which culminate in an Ayn Randish fifty-page rant in the epilogue). I will never be the same aga…