Welcome to Litsy!

An intellectual in Leningrad struggles to survive during the German siege of his city from 1941 to 1944. He tries to keep sane by taking notes. Gradually, however, hunger takes over everything else. The fear of bombs, the cold, human dignity, it‘s nothing compared to the hunger, which dominates everything.

#19822022 #1988

#WeeklyForecast 39/22

I actually finished The Rabbit Hutch after I took this pic. Review to come up soon. I loved it!
Booth is in progress, I am enjoying that one too. I am about to start the Africa book for the challenge and have the tagged one lined up too. Ambitions!

Finally got back to reading this monster. I've decided against taking notes on words because I wasn't advancing at all. I understand a lot of the words but it's hard for me to pronounce many of them so I'm just annotating the book #spanish

#FirstLineFridays

This book didn‘t completely hang together but the topic was really interesting: the creation of the Jewish state of Birobidzhan in remote Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, with some support from the Jewish community and some from the Soviets who wanted to push Jews further west, increasing after the Holocaust and almost completely destroyed by Stalin.Like my previous review, this is very much a story of diaspora.
#Booked2021 #JewishAuthor

All local Russian museums begin with rocks. They are the ideal museum exhibit. Rocks do not need to be rearranged in case of a regime shift. In the Birobidzhan museum rocks take up the entire first floor.

This is a must read for anyone wanting to understand and appreciate Soviet Russia and its aftermath as today‘s Russia. David Remnick intertwines Czarist, Soviet (primarily Stalin), and post-Soviet history and impressions in a thorough and fascinating manner. He provides a telling that makes Putin‘s subsequent rise (and current place as Russia‘s modern “Czar”) wholly relatable.

The Soviet Tragedy is an essential coda to the literature of Soviet studies, Malia has made an enormous contribution. He has written the history of a utopian illusion and the tragic consequences it had for the people of the Soviet Union and the world.

In a book full of bonkers elite types, this pun tickled me.

(Sir Reginald Bullying Manner...)

I just moved to Moscow and this is the first book I've read start to finish since arriving. It should have been depressing, since it's the story of an alcoholic dissident writer struggling to eke out a living at a tourist site devoted to the writer Pushkin during the early 80s in the Soviet Union. Instead, it made me laugh more than once, mainly because of the narrator's ironic and observant sense of humor about his situation and life in general.