Yes. The question is always whether now is the right time, and the answer to that is almost always yes too, because War and Peace does not require a particular level of prior reading or a particular mood. It requires time and patience with Russian names, and those are the only real prerequisites.
The reputation of War and Peace as the most demanding novel in the Western canon is the result of its length — approximately 1,400 pages in most editions — and its combination of fiction and philosophy. Tolstoy interrupts the narrative with essays on historical causation, which some readers find interesting and some find annoying, but which can be read quickly or skimmed without losing the thread of the story. The novel itself — the story of the Bolkonsky, Rostov, and Bezukhov families across the Napoleonic Wars — is not difficult. It is long and detailed and inhabited, and it reads with a momentum that most 400-page novels don't achieve.
The characters are the reason to read it. Natasha Rostova, who appears as a thirteen-year-old girl in the early chapters and whom you watch grow into a woman across two decades; Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son who inherits a fortune and spends the novel trying to understand what to do with his life; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who goes to war looking for glory and comes back changed in ways that take hundreds of pages to fully emerge. These are among the most fully realized characters in fiction, and Tolstoy's method of rendering them — attending to the small physical detail, the involuntary gesture, the thought that precedes the speech — was something new in the novel when he invented it and has not been superseded.
The war sections are genuinely good in ways that military history rarely is. Tolstoy fought in the Crimean War and wrote about battle from experience, which is why his battle scenes feel different from those of writers who haven't been in one: the chaos, the failure of communication, the disconnect between what generals plan and what soldiers experience, the randomness of survival. The Battle of Borodino is the most accurate account of the experience of large-scale battle in any novel.
The best translation for English readers is the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, which is also the longest. Some readers prefer the older translations — Constance Garnett, Aylmer Maude — for their more idiomatic English prose. The Maude translation, which Tolstoy himself approved, is available free in the public domain. Any of these will give you the essential experience; the Pevear and Volokhonsky version is more literal and preserves more of the texture of Tolstoy's Russian.
For readers who want to approach Tolstoy before committing to War and Peace, the short stories and novellas offer a useful preview of his method. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) is seventy pages and one of the most powerful short works in the language — a bureaucrat's confrontation with his own dying, which forces a reexamination of a life spent achieving things that turn out to matter very little. Hadji Murat (1912, published posthumously) is a short novel about a Chechen warrior caught between Russian imperial power and his own people, and it demonstrates Tolstoy's ability to enter completely into a consciousness utterly unlike his own.
If you have already read War and Peace and are looking for what comes next, the obvious destination is The Brothers Karamazov — Dostoevsky's masterpiece, which Tolstoy considered the greatest novel ever written and which addresses many of the same questions (faith, doubt, family, the nature of the good life) from a different temperament and a very different philosophy. The literary fiction shelf at byallo carries it.
The answer to the question in the title is yes. The caveat is that it will take longer than you think — not because it is slow, but because you will keep stopping to think about what just happened, and to go back and reread the scene with Natasha at the first ball, or the moment Pierre realizes something he has known all along.