Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Finished this in two days! Like Cancer Ward it was very good, though less in-depth and more politically oriented; he wrote it as an expose of Stalinist labor camps because he had been in one for 8 years. I can't believe that he spends 200 pages writing about a ~20-hour period.

Again, sorry for writing so much. You can ignore these book thoughts, they're not as relevant to my own life as the personal writing.

Some quotes I liked:

"The hospital block was the most out-of-the-way corner of the compound, and there was no noise from outside. ....You didn't even hear a mouse scratching. They'd all been caught by the hospital cat appointed for that purpose." (22)

A cat APPOINTED to a position? LOL that's just funny, but also revealing.

The man are working...
Then they brought in a can to melt snow for the mortar. They heard somebody say it was twelve o'clock already.

"It must be,"Shukhov said. "The sun's right overhead."

""If it's right overhead," the Captain shot back, "that means it's one o'clock, not twelve."

"How come?" Shukhov asked. "Any old man can tell you the sun is highest at noon."

"That's what the old guys say!" the Captain snapped. "But since then, there's been a law passed and now the sun's highest at one."

"Who passed the law?"

"The Soviet Government!" (73-74)

If the sun breaks the law, will they put it in jail? Give it the death penalty, thereby destroying our entire ecosystem? A laughable idea.

I also liked the dialogue between Shukhov and Alyoshka on pages 195-199, when they discussed God. But it's too long to type, if you're really interested then go read the book. It's a quick read, definitely worth it.