Welcome to Litsy!

So excited for #fabulousfebrurary this week, despite my late start! Looking at a massive winter storm and cold temps this week which = reading weather!
1️⃣Finish the tagged (why is Russian lit so boring)
2️⃣ Get a #bookspin bingo!
3️⃣ Start THE DEAD WANDER IN THE DESERT
4️⃣ Track my pages for fun. :)

Thanks @Andrew65 for hosting this each month!

Feeling a little bit meh about my #weeklyforecast picks, but hoping it‘s just that time of the month where I get excited about February‘s TBR. Wish me luck!

Finally finished my #Bookspin for May. This was easy to read, yet sometimes frustrating. Because how can you think like that?! I admired the spirit people had while they were exiled, called non-citizens and having been robbed of their rights. Astonished how patients weren't allowed to know of their disease. But insightful too. I am so glad I was born here.
616 pages TBR since ?

@TheAromaofBooks

A little light reading tonight... #bibliophile #mustread

Having recently lost a loved one to cancer, this may seem like a punishing choice of reading material. But the insight into the mind of a people with cancer (albeit in a 1950s Russian cancer ward) was something I welcomed. For all its focus on living with and dying from cancer and allusions to the difficulties of life under Stalin, Solzhenitsyn has a light touch and the humanity of all his characters is at the heart of this extraordinary novel.

Halfway through my mini eggs with a book and a lump of a dog next to me. It's the perfect evening

A big, slow book about one cancer treatment ward in a provincial Soviet hospital in 1955. The ward itself is a microcosm of Soviet society - the bureaucrat, the exile, the hopeful kid, the worker, the intellectual - mixed with the hope and despair of serious illness. The book opens with Rusanov (the bureaucrat) and closes with Kostoglotov (the exile) and follows these men's ideologies at the exact point Stalin's policies are becoming unfavorable.

Rusanov got interesting all of a sudden.

Ta-da!!! I have finished the #24in48 Readathon! Four books finished, one audio book mostly finished (Radium Girls), and one book started (Cancer Ward). Thanks to all the @24in48 admins and helpers for organizing and running this shindig again!! It's always a blast 😽😽

Opening line: "On top of it all, the cancer wing was 'number thirteen'." #cancerward #alexandersolzhenitsyn #penguinclassics #readmore #instabook #bookstagram #bookgnome #firstline #bookcover #bookish

I studied Russian history at school and was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I went on to read everything written by Solzhenitsyn but Cancer Ward is my favourite. It's a masterpiece of satirical allegory and a cornerstone in my love of Russian and eastern European lit 😊
#photoadaynov16 #day6 #readinschool

Monthly #stats seem to be popular on Litsy, so I'll try as well! Favorite of the month is Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn. #statistics (Did I forget some important thing to count?) #tricoursstats

Finally, a Russian book that I REALLY liked! This is an extremely well written, slow paced story of the daily life of patients and employees at a cancer ward somewhere in an Asian Soviet republic in 1954, with the soviet mindset, customs, oppression and resignation, coupled with fear of death. Wonderfully interesting!

"Dying 'one day' isn't frightening, it's dying right now that is frightening."

Yep, still loving this!

127 pages in and I constantly want to continue reading this, even though it's a bit slow for me due to the not all that trivial Russian. The structure is great (jumping from character to character, providing variation), the setting with both the Soviet anxiety+secrecy and the hospital ward with imminent death hanging over half the characters make this a perfect read.

I read 190 pages in this like 4 years ago. Now I have to start from page 1 and I'm struck by how much time each page takes 😳