I'm beating the jannies to the punch for that sweet, sweet dramacoin
I'm reading This Kind of War a history of the Korean War recommended by Mattis. It's an older book so has some very dated terminology, and an older way of thinking. But pretty solid so far, very play by play.
I've been on a huge non-fiction kick recently reading Rampage (about Japan in the Philippines.) A book about the fall of Japan whose name I don't remember
and before that The Franco Prussian War by Wawro. I've liked all of them with Rampage being the hardest to read due to crazy Japanese crimes. I think the last fiction book I read was Medicus a Roman murder mystery that was really enjoyable.
Dramatards what y'all reading?
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Not trying to meme or be pretentious, but I just started War and Peace.
The only other Tolstoy novel I've read was Anna Karenina, but it's been interesting to see how Tolstoy's depicts the hypocritical morality of the aristocrats of his day in both. There are so many parallels with modern day virtue signaling and other social phenomena, but I guess that's why they're such great novels; the human observations are timeless. The more things change, the more things stay the same etc.
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That's actually been on my list of books to read for a while. I'll take this as a sign to finally get on it.
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I’m 3/4 of the way through Anna Karenina and it’s been great so far.
I highly suggest Dostoevsky then, especially The Brothers Karamazov for a read that touches communism+religion and Crime & Punishment for a read about nihilism. Obviously both books are significantly more interesting than the topics I mentioned, but it was funny reading TBK and seeing word for word the same shitty arguments for communism, except being mocked ~200 years ago.
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I just finished first volume and I'm very glad I finally gave it a go. Surprisingly easy read.
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Tolstoy + other rus writers are to intimidating to me, like a wide, massive bundle into my tight English Anglo Saxon hole. Are they really worth tackling?
I have the patience for some long books, especially the value in how they show timeless human observations, as you say. If you think it has helped you understand the world better, or if it was memorable somehow then I count it as an awesome read.
It’s also pretentious and all that but 1984
has been hitting me hard with how the thing Orwell observed is paralleled today. For me what was most worthwhile was the connections to warfare with the people and how that ties into the power/obedience stuff.
Reading that one might have broken my brain a little bit, too often applying the concepts and thinking that I might have gone insane by the way. Turing me from a no politics man into a politics everything man
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This is a hard question to answer because it depends on your skill as a reader, your patience for intellectual and creative exercise, and what you're looking to get out of it. A novel like 1984 wears its applicability on its sleeve, but you'll have to suss out the subtext in the great Russian works to really get a lot out of them, and some of their language and ideas are certainly more dated. I don't think it's worth it to force yourself to read them if you have no particular interest--that'll probably undermine their effect--but if you are serious about literature, it's worth trying to tackle them at some point.
If you're not exactly sure where you stand and want to give them a try, I would suggest a couple potential starting points. First, you could sample their short stories to get a feel for their individual styles, maybe something from Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album or Chekhov's About Love Trilogy. Second, if you're just looking to dive straight into one author, I would recommend Dostoevsky or Gogol. Dostoevsky's darker, sort of existentialist themes are less subtle than some of the other authors' works and might be more in line with what you want if you're looking for something that 'explores the human condition.' Gogol holds up as being very funny imo(I love his story The Nose), and his surrealist/absurdist style is probably the most striking and unique if that appeals to you. Nabokov's Pinin is also funny and one of his more approachable works.
Hope that helps.
That's the funny thing about the whole "everything is political" canard leftists like to use as a cudgel today. There's clearly some value in the idea, especially when it comes to analyzing artistic works, but they take it to such a blunt extreme that they destroy all its utility. Literature is all about patterns and emotions under the surface, and its hard to stop seeing them when you look critically at a work you're really invested in, but that becomes a useless exercise when you try and force everything into some overt mold of power politics.
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