This is one of those rare books that it's not possible to exaggerate. It is a flawless masterpiece of modern literature. Some passages made me cry from their sheer beauty.

I love the characters, I love the story, I love everything about this book. If you enjoy literature, especially historical fiction, please read it.

Edited to add:

I read this in 2014, and just finished listening to the audiobook (January 2017), read by the author. I highly recommend it. The author has a beautiful Southern accent and he reads relatively slowly, allowing you to savour the poetry of this book. If you need your fiction to be fast moving, however, you probably would not enjoy it. :)

As I said before, this book is beautiful literature. This time around, one of the things that occurred to me was the subtly implied explanation of the willingness of so many non-slaveholding white people to go to war for the Confederacy. I think, to a certain extent, they were victims of propaganda — lacking the education and/or means to scrutinize that propaganda. No doubt the majority were extreme racists (by today's standards), but they didn't go to war because they wanted to protect slavery. For most of them, slavery was neither here nor there. (It's hard for us to imagine that abolitionism was an extremist position, and slavery was neither here nor there for most in the North too.) They went to war because they had been convinced by the elites that Northern politicians were pushing them around and trying to interfere in their rights to govern themselves. They went to protect their homeland from invasion by uppity Northerners. The rich and powerful slaveholders were able to convince the average man to kill and to die in order to protect those slaveholders' immoral practices and financial interests. The tragedy of slavery is compounded by the further tragedy of vast numbers dying for that foul cause. I don't know if this hypothesis has evidence supporting it. It's something I intend to find out more about.