What are you currently reading?

Started by facehugger, April 07, 2007, 12:36:10 AM

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Artem

Quote from: Florestan on April 26, 2021, 11:24:32 AM
politically I am a staunch and unrepentant Russophobe, culturally I am a staunch and unrepentant Russophile.  :D
As a Russian I would cosign this. Fully agree with you sentiment.

What I meant about the early 20th century, is that so much artistic talent had been suppressed in the second half of that century.

Florestan

#10821
Quote from: Artem on April 26, 2021, 11:38:52 AM
As a Russian I would cosign this. Fully agree with you sentiment.

I'm only too glad, Artyom (that's the right transliteration, ain't it?  8) )

QuoteWhat I meant about the early 20th century, is that so much artistic talent had been suppressed in the second half of that century.

Tentatively suppressed yes, agreed --- but never succesfully so. The Russian spirit, just like any other nation's spirit, can never be suppressed. Tyrants come and go --- artists, especially great ones, let alone geniuses, always remain.

Здраствуйце, мой друг! --- and rest assured this is not mere Google Translate at work; I've studied Russian for 4 years in my secondary school --- I can fluently read, if not always completely understand, Russian --- but the above greeting has been in my vocabulary for a long time! I can even sign my name in Russian --- see here:

https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,304.msg1345220.html#msg1345220

:-*
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

Artem

That's really cool, Florestan.  :)

Florestan

Quote from: Artem on April 26, 2021, 12:00:56 PM
That's really cool, Florestan.  :)

My Top 20th Century Russian writers, no particular order:

Yevgeny Zamyatin
Mikhail Bulgakov
Boris Pasternak
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Bulat Okudjava


Have not read yet but on my wishlist: Mikhail Sholokhov, Chingiz Aitmatov

Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

Brian

I've started to eye the humongous novels of Vasily Grossman. Someone talk me out of it! ...or into it?

Artem

You should definitely read it. Life and Fate is a great book, one of my favourites.

Florestan

Quote from: Artem on April 26, 2021, 10:43:09 PM
You should definitely read it. Life and Fate is a great book, one of my favourites.

+ 1. It's the 20th-century War and Peace.
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

vers la flamme

#10827
Yes, I read We by Yevgeny Zamyatin for my Russian literature in translation class back in college, but it's been about 7 years now. I probably owe it a reread.

Edit: Currently reading The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene.



I'm not very far into the book but I am liking it so far.

Brian

The Mel Brooks movie is worth watching!

vers la flamme

Quote from: Florestan on April 26, 2021, 12:17:12 PM
My Top 20th Century Russian writers, no particular order:

Yevgeny Zamyatin
Mikhail Bulgakov
Boris Pasternak
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Bulat Okudjava


Have not read yet but on my wishlist: Mikhail Sholokhov, Chingiz Aitmatov

Of these I've only read Zamyatin and Bulgakov, strongly preferring the latter—Master & Margarita is a brilliant book, as is the shorter Heart of a Dog which I read for the aforementioned Russian lit class. (Coolest class in college, one of the few I remember in much detail.) Would love to read Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and Grossman who you didn't mention in this post but did elsewhere. Can't say I know of the others you mentioned. I'm a budding literary Russophile though I've only read the biggest of big names: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, and Pushkin. Though my big focus of this year is Japanese literature I would love to spend a year doing a deep dive of exploring all the great Russians I have yet to read. The Brothers Karamazov is one of my most memorable (re)reads of 2021 so far. What a book.

Brian

Read Gogol!!

I have read some Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn but it was a long time ago. Gogol's stories and unfinished novel are spectacular. Last year during the early pandemic I decided to jump right in and read all of War and Peace.

Another dissident fiction writer during the Soviet years who deserves attention is Andrey Platonov. Some of the short stories are powerful indeed.

Artem

#10831
For Platonov I'd recommend his novel Chevengur from the 1920s. It's really dark and wild.

Petersburg by Andrei Bely
Cynics by Anatoly Marienhof
Novel With Cocaine by Mark Ageev

Bely's writing is more on the symbolism, mysticism side of things, but it's really great. Mariengof and Ageev are super gloomy in that pre/post revolutionary doom, death and disintegration.

The best contemporary writer to me is Vladimir Sorokin. I think NYRB had some of his books published. Earlier ones are the best.

On another note, here's a cool list for book lovers: https://www.dw.com/en/buddenbrooks-to-hooligan-links-to-100-german-must-reads-and-their-publishers/a-46289646

Florestan

Quote from: Brian on April 27, 2021, 05:20:59 PM
Read Gogol!!

Seconded. Dead Souls and The Government Inspector are absolute masterpieces and so are some his novellas and short stories.

Another great Russian book is Ivan Gontcharov's Oblomov, one of the most fun and melancholy books I've ever read. Dostoievsky, Tolstoy and Tchekhov held this writer in high esteem.
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

Florestan

Quote from: vers la flamme on April 27, 2021, 01:34:05 PM
Of these I've only read Zamyatin and Bulgakov, strongly preferring the latter—Master & Margarita is a brilliant book, as is the shorter Heart of a Dog which I read for the aforementioned Russian lit class. (Coolest class in college, one of the few I remember in much detail.)

I've seen Heart of a Dog dramatized as a play. Excellent. The White Guard, his other novel, is very good too.

QuoteGrossman who you didn't mention in this post but did elsewhere.

Life and Fate is one of the greatest 20th-century books.

QuoteCan't say I know of the others you mentioned.

Nadezhda Mandelstam was the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam (imprisoned in Gulag on Stalin's direct order, where he died) and wrote two volumes of memoirs about his husband and what life was like in the USSR: Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned. Worth reading.

Bulat Okudzhava was a Russian / Soviet songwriter, singer and writer of Georgian / Armenian backgground. I've read and very much enjoyed his novel  Nocturne: From the Notes of Lt. Amiran Amilakhvari, Retired (the Romanian title was translated differently and much shorter: The JOurney of the Dilettantes)
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

Florestan

Quote from: Artem on April 27, 2021, 10:37:22 PM
On another note, here's a cool list for book lovers: https://www.dw.com/en/buddenbrooks-to-hooligan-links-to-100-german-must-reads-and-their-publishers/a-46289646

For Robert Musil I'd have chosen The Man without Qualities, for Joseph Roth I'd have chosen Radetzky's March, for Hermann Hesse I'd have chosen Steppenwolf, for Ernst Junger I'd have chosen On the Marble Cliffs.
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

Ganondorf

Finished re-reading Pride and Prejudice a couple of days ago. What a book!

Brian

Thanks for the Gontcharov rec, I will definitely investigate. Petersburg by Bely is an incredible riot of a book.

steve ridgway

Astounding Science Fiction May 1942 from archive.org


vers la flamme

#10838
Just finished rereading Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle.



I enjoyed it much more this time around. I think the first time around I was expecting more dystopian tropes, like some kind of underground resistance movement that the characters are intimately involved with, but there's nothing of the sort to be found (besides a subversive book-within-a-book which ultimately plays into a very Dickian conclusion). Instead this book concerns itself primarily with the mundane, everyday interactions of a handful of people in an alternate reality. A surprisingly subtle book. Anyway, I need to read more Dick. Fascinating author.

vers la flamme

Irène Némirovsky's posthumously published, incomplete epic, Suite Française



I was initially drawn to this book, as one might expect, by the Bach connection of the title, but after learning more of the circumstances behind the writing and publication of this book (some 60 years after it was written), I decided that I had to read this. I'm about halfway into the novel and enjoying it so far. It has an ensemble cast of characters, all involved in one way or another in the exodus from Paris to the provinces during the German invasion of France in World War II. There are some extremely harrowing scenes described here. I'm a bit of a budding WWII junkie and I suspect I'll find something to appreciate in any book on the subject, fiction or non, but I guess I must admit that it doesn't quite live up to what I was expecting. I can comfortably blame this on the fact that the author only had the chance to finish about a third of what she was planning to write before she was murdered in the Holocaust. And, of course, my thoughts may change by the end of the book. It seems that I find about half of the many characters much more interesting than the other half.