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Notes -
The wife and I decided that instead of watching 3 hours of TV a night, we should read together, which has been a nice change. The wife suffers a bit from literary narcolepsy. Which is to say, reading puts her immediately to sleep. So the night turns into 10-20 minutes of us reading together, and then me reading for another 2 hours while she's asleep on the couch next to me. Which is fine by me.
I finished A Princess of Mars and Day of the Oprichnik this week.
I gotta admit, A Princess of Mars left me underwhelmed. All the descriptions were just so perfunctory and staid. You'd think it would be difficult to describe the fantastical flora and fauna of a living mars in a boring manner, but he pulled it off. The characters are frankly tedious and boring as well. Even the action is so-so. Possibly the most interesting part of the book is the fact that it came out in 1912. Which means the main character, a former confederate cavalry officer and southern gentlemen, is generally esteemed and presented as a noble and moral person. It also heavily features the canals of mars, which were believed to exist at the time he wrote it. Has some fun airship battles, which play out like naval battles since the era of flight, or aerial combat, was so new when he wrote it.
Was also interesting to read on wikipedia how the book influenced Heinlein, Arthur C Clarke, Ray Bradbury, James Cameron, Flash Gordon and Carl Sagan. But ultimately, I can't really give it a recommendation.
Day of the Oprichnik was wild. Really pulled me along, and I finished it in about two days. Checking the wiki for this book, something like 70% of it is analysis, so I'm sure most of the subtext of the book went over my head. But I enjoyed it all the same. Honestly I don't want to spoil anything about it, since going in completely blind was half the fun for me. I will say, it's a bewildering and perversely charming slice of life story in a dystopian Russia. It's also 100% from the first person perspective and an enforcer of the regime. So that's fun.
At first the book doesn't even resemble typical Sorokin's prose, lulls you with its now obviously prophetic story and then the centipede scene bludgeons you from behind like a stealthy mugger.
Yeah, I knew nothing about it, the author, or anything. Just showed up in a list of recommended Russian literature.
Apparently Russia also has a hyperventilating liberal class shouting "THIS BOOK IS LITERALLY JUST LIKE RUSSIA IS TODAY!" Which seems... unlikely. I know it's not great, but yeah.
It's not literally that, but consider that it was written in 2006, right in the middle of the first, pro-Western phase of Putin's rule. The whole idea of Russia isolating itself from the West, reinventing itself as a junior partner of China and adopting an explicitly reactionary internal policy sounded about as plausible as the plot of The Day After Tomorrow back then.
Superficial people were misled by the Chinese efforts at pretending they're going to liberalize. Anyone with a more suspicious mind and some real interest in China would have understood that's a lie.
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2006 was when Politkovskaya’s murder happened, and at least in Finland that was widely considered a sign that things were developing to an adverse direction. Of course even before that it was common to speculate on far-right/left forces taking over in Russia, and Putin was considered at least lightly authoritarian.
Politkovskaya's murder went relatively unnoticed here, since her favourite topic wasn't exactly popular with the general public. "Chechens killing other Chechens? Finally some good news!"
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So what happened? Where did it all go wrong? Was Putin not invited to the slumber parties?
Depends on which Kremlinologist you ask. If you ask the man himself, like Tucker did, it all went wrong when Wolfowitz proposed his unilateralist doctrine.
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