Book Log 2023 #2: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For years, seventh grade world history classes at my junior high school read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Except for my class in my seventh grade year, when the teacher pulled an audible and assigned this book instead.  In retrospect the change makes some sense, as it's a shorter book and I don't think the class really spent much time on Africa. And it was in the middle of the Cold War, so some added insight into the Evil Empire couldn't hurt.

Except that the class, almost to a person, decided not to read the book. I myself barely got more than ten pages in when I decided to bail. I didn't find the book too difficult, it just didn't click for me (much like A Passage to India, which I was also supposed to read at some point and bailed on early).  You can imagine the talking to we got after taking the test on the book.

Anyway, I decided to give this another try for a reading challenge (read a book you bailed on in school), and found it much better going this time around (which I did not experience when I took my second pass at A Passage to India). I think younger me would have actually liked the book had he stuck with it. Its depiction of gulag life in the Stalin-era Soviet Union shows both the brutality and the mundanity of the system, and how one man finds ways to manipulate both so he can survive to the next day.

If you have any interest in the Soviet era, you should read this.