Emily Temple has a brief, but long list of hard books: “Some books are only for the toughest readers on the block, your Sylvester Stallones of literature.”
Emily Temple has a brief, but long list of hard books: “Some books are only for the toughest readers on the block, your Sylvester Stallones of literature.”
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I’ve read 5 of them. Moby Dick, The Silmarillion, Heart of Darkness, The Divine Comedy, and A Tale of a Tub. Enjoyed all of them, generally. Maybe I should try more from the list… no. No, I don’t think I will just now.
Yeah, these aren’t equally tough. In fact, some poorly written books are far tougher to wade through than these.
I have read a few of them; Moby Dick, The Silmarillion, The Gulag Archipelago. I’ve listened to the librivox.org audio reading of Longfellow’s translation of The Divine Comedy. Currently I’m halfway through my second reading of The Gulag Archipelago, the first having been 25 years ago. Solzenhitzn is one of my favourite authors. He has a knack for displaying the human spirit rising above adverse circumstances in his prison novels. However, I was never able to slog thorugh August 1914, the first book in his Red Wheel Trilogy about WWI.
I picked up The Sound and The Fury from a used book table a year or so back but it is still on my nightstand with a dozen other books stacked on top of it. I also have a Kafka book in that pile, but not the one in this list.
My current book on tape in my car is War and Peace. I got through a couple cassettes driving to Fargo and back today. I have to admit, though, that I’m listening to the BBC Radio dramatization of it rather than an actual reading of an English translation.
An interesting note from the Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn observed that when the economy of the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1920’s, shortly after the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin would not admit that the failed collective farms and nationalized industry was to blame. Rather, he identified the problem as “Wreckers,” people working to undermine the ascent of socialism. Within a short time, labor camps multiplied beyond imagination and millions of wreckers were arrested, interrogated, convicted, sentenced and sent to provide slave labor for an array of public works projects. Solzhenitsyn discusses at length how quickly the new system was accepted and even endorsed by the Soviet people. . . sometimes even after the black maria had come to their door in the middle of the night.
One wonders how soon our leaders will embrace Stalin’s strategy for dealing with failure.
I worry about the same thing.
Prison labor does sound like an effective way to prop up unsustainable public policy. We have immigrant labor performing a similar function now.