My Christmas gift/New Year’s resolution for myself
Following through on something I mentioned a while ago, I’ve decided to sign up for the Russian Reading Challenge 2008. The post title comes from the fact I view reading as always a gift to myself and the challenge requires me to resolve to get certain books read. Besides, it fits in with the foreign fiction fixation I’ve developed.
The challenge only requires four books over the course of 2008 by authors who wrote (write) in Russian or authors who wrote (write) about Russia and Russians. Only four books are required because Russian novels tend to be quite long (think War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, etc.) and the challenge recognizes we have other things to do. Still, I may read more than four as I’ve got a couple shorter novels on the list of candidates and may end up counting two short novels as one.
The list, which is subject to change on varying whims, also seeks to go from classic to modern works. The candidates, in no particular order, are:
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (I’ve read this before but The Whisperers by Orlando Figes prompts me to read it again.)
- Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov
- Ice, Vladimir Sorokin
- One Soldier’s War, Arkady Babchenko
- The Slynx, Tatyana Tolstaya
- The Story of a Nobody, Anton Chekhov (not currently counted toward challenge)
- Soul: And Other Stories, Andrey Platonov
This will likely serve as my anchor post and I’ll put the ones I’ve completed in bold. I may also crosspost a bit over at the Russian Reading Challenge blog.
LAST UPDATED: April 6, 2008
Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited - dimly, briefly - by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1970 Nobel Lecture
December 26th, 2007 | Category: A Reading Life
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December 27th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
I have to recomend “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin
It’s a classic Dystopian Sci-Fi novel that pre-dates 1984.
December 27th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
I read it about a year ago and, but for that, would have included it in the list.
December 28th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
I hadn’t heard of the Russian Reading Challenge - it’s such a nice idea! In the meanwhile, I thought you may be interested in the review of Soul that Elif Batuman just wrote for the New York Sun, under the title “Romancing the Locomotive”:
http://www.nysun.com/article/68544
Happy reading!