karamazov30

Oh I am writing about a blog post every month, what a terrible percentage.

I am recently off of a surgery and was confined to my bed for almost a week, far longer than I think anyone should be in bed. Just to say, why do we, or at the least myself, never realize how nice it is to be healthy until we are fucked? I regret this is a failing, never grasping somethings true importance until it is gone, but I digress.

I had the chance to read and read and read, in between stops on all my favorite sites. I finished re-reading Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls for one. Its a classic novel by a classic Russian author. I am not sure how popular it is these days, but it should be very popular. In brief it is the story of a man who sets out to buy "dead Souls", or the rights to dead serfs in Czarist Russia of long ago. Gogol has such a style, that even after all this time the book remains highly relevant and funny in many areas. He uses satire so powerfully, I really recommend the book to anyone interested in Russian literature.

I also finished "Censoring An Iranian Love story" by Shahriar Mandanipour. This is one of the most uncoventional books I have read in some time. The author shifts voices, narratives, storylines, etc... so much that at times it can be hard but it remains fruitful to keep reading. And with the current troubles in Iran over the elections there, it provides a timely glimpse into the Iranian state and the travails of the people there.

I will soon be able to report on "The Stalin Eigram" by Robert Littell. To give a brief overview it is a novel dealing with a poem, namely one that during the height of Stalin's reign of oppression and terror in Soviet Russia, dared to criticize the "Kremlin Mountineer".

Finally I have begin to re-read "Brothers Karamazov" by Fyedor Dostoevsky. This is a difficult book in both size and sheer scope of the literary power, but one that is never boring and always interesting.