Finally picked up Grapes of Wrath, and damn is it good. Steinbeck has such beautiful prose when he’s not writing southern dialect.
What other classics are still compelling today? If it’s any help, I don’t really dig Vonnegut, Asimov, and Huxley.
My English teacher introduced us to Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”. Would highly recommend this one.
i mean not to cosign the entire western canon, but for the vast majority of books people call “classics” there’s at least something there, even if it’s not to your taste.
idk. Read the Whale Book.
Jaroslav Hašek is insanely good, anything by him is fire. And his biography is also bonkers.
I’d recommend War and Peace, if nothing else so that I can talk about it with others on this site. On the one hand, it denounces the great man theory and touches on a lot of ideas that are in line with leftist theory, on the other the main focus is on Russia’s nobility and it doesn’t seem to make any strong statements on the liberation of Russia’s peasantry. Is it a proto-leftist text or was it simply produced before a vocabulary around these ideas was prevalent enough to be articulated in Tolstoy’s writing? Either way, I really enjoyed the novel, its characters, their hardships and the way it weaved such a detailed and vivid picture of life in Russia during the Napoleonic Wars.
War and Peace is great!
Tolstoy’s take on Great Man theory is interesting, because I think he goes a bit too far in the other direction, really explicitly talking about how history is kind of a random meandering of events. While I think his perspective is correct about the emergent complexity of events being unknowable is correct, I think he’s a bit too much of a fatalist about our own agency in shaping events.
it doesn’t seem to make any strong statements on the liberation of Russia’s peasantry I’m still trying to figure out some of Tolstoy’s ideas about Russian peasantry. Ana Karenina has a lot more extensive rumination on the subject, although a lot of it is framed through the perspective of Russian aristocracy. What surprised me about Tolstoy’s work was how much explicit discussion of communism and the future of society… although in retrospect, it makes sense, given that these were written only a few decades out from the revolution. Tolstoy definitely gave the subject some thought, but he wasn’t a secret communist or anything.
My favorite WTF part is when like 40 dudes accidentally drown themselves trying to impress their Waifu Bonaparte. I also get a chuckle out of how often Pierre gets scammed by Masons (he would definitely be one of those dudes posting his L’s on r/wallstreetbet)
War and Peace is supposedly really good, but don’t you almost need to have a notebook nearby just to keep track of all the characters and their relationships to each other? I definitely needed that when I began reading Brothers Karamazov, and I barely made it past the first couple of chapters.
I don’t think it’s any worse than some modern epics. I will say: Tolstoy is really into realism, and one very “realistic” thing he does is have tons of characters with very similar names to confuse the hell out of you
