Literature: Rate and Discuss

The Rommel Papers - B. H. Liddell Hart

Just started reading this this morning, I was never too much into in depth accounts of war and government (with the exception of "Inside the Third Reich" by Albert Speer) but I'm finding the book is actually enjoyable. I love how Rommel recounts his military victories (especially the awesome stuff he did in WW1) almost without ego, but with the sort of attitude of a father trying to teach.

The letters to his wife make me a bit sad, considering how he died. Otherwise, its been a great read so far.
 
Bad Science - Ben Goldacre
10/10
Funny, informative, even educational for many people. A great commentary on how science and pseudoscience are reported in the British media.
 
The Outsider(L'Etranger) - Albert Camus
9/10

An extremely interesting look at the absurdity of life and am unorthodox view of the world. Quite short, only took me a part of the day to read but around about the right length for this sort of tale. Also one of the funniest endings i have ever read but i think that just says alot about me as a person really.
 
A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick - 10/10

Second time I've read this. Despite not like Philip K. Dick's other (more sci-fi) novels that much, I really love this one. I can't find anything faults with it. It's really down to earth -- probably because the author actually lived through everything in the novel. I liked almost all the characters (apart from Barris, but probably no one likes Barris). I kind of dreaded reading it again because the first time around, I read a little every day for about a week and just felt like crap because it was really depressing.

This time I spread it out over a pretty long time. Some of the humor came out more (when I read the "What's a Henway"... "About three pounds" joke I cracked up... I have no idea why as it's a totally lame joke) -- but overall it was still completely depressing. Even the humorous parts end up being depressing in the grand scheme of things.

And then when I'm at the end of the novel and feeling all depressed, there's the Author's Note (best saved for after reading the novel, but can also stand on its own). I finished reading it this morning and started crying :eek:.


SimpleAssassin said:
The Outsider(L'Etranger) - Albert Camus
9/10

An extremely interesting look at the absurdity of life and am unorthodox view of the world. Quite short, only took me a part of the day to read but around about the right length for this sort of tale. Also one of the funniest endings i have ever read but i think that just says alot about me as a person really.
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I was never a big fan of that book. I didn't like any of the characters and was pretty frustrated with the way they thought/acted. Maybe that says something about me as a person, I dunno :p.
 
dfc05 said:



I was never a big fan of that book. I didn't like any of the characters and was pretty frustrated with the way they thought/acted. Maybe that says something about me as a person, I dunno :p.
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I can understand that. I wasn't a fan of all the characters and the courtroom scene frustrated the living **** out of me at times. I liked Meursault though, and his consistent indifference mostly for personal reasons. I would take coming away from this book hating it and everyone in it as a positive. It does say something about you as a person but for the better i would say.:)

And i still need to read A Scanner Darkly.
 
All Clear on the Western Front - 9/10

About a German soldier in WWI, on the western front.

I was first confused with the style, kinda like a diary, and the same time a narrative, but once I got used to it, the book was awesome. It was smooth, it was good. The last line with its "All Clear on the Western Front" made me a bit sad.

"Starship Troopers", Robert A. Heinlein - 10/10

Loved it. Absolutely loved it. Especially the classroom bits where the ethics teachers talk about political ideology. If my way of thought has a basis, this is absolutely it.

The only thing I can think of to criticize this book is the fact that the characters are a little bit shallow.
 
Let the Right One In -John Ajvide Lindqvist

9/10

A bleak and creepy Vampire story set in the western suburbs of Sweden during the 1980s. Blood, self destruction, perversion, longing and failed relationships - nearly every character is damaged goods. It's also endearing and frail and very human.

I'm a big fan of the movie - saw it first - and now the book. For those that have seen the film - it comprises of around one third of the story and misses out on major characters, backstory and a few - the most gruesome and distrubing - plot points.
 
That just increases my admiration of the film. When adaptors don't have the discipline to properly ****ing slim down a book for its screen appearance, things get shite. It speaks volumes for their craft that it was a bloody great movie in its own right.
 
Agreed. I love how stark and threadbare the movie is and cramming in content would have spoilt it. It also gives a reason beyond fleshing things out to read the book.
 
Millennium - Tom Holland

Tom Holland is by far my favourite non-fiction writer. Nobody does narrative history better than him. Persian Fire was great and Rubicon ranks in my personal top 5 of best books ever. Millennium is a good book as well. It is basically about the history of Europe between 750AD and 1100 AD. A pivotal period, because this was when the continent developed into its current form. The proto-versions of countries like France, Germany, and Spain came into existence. It was also the time when the Catholic church managed to grab hold of all the souls in Europe and converted (almost) all the peoples north of the Alps. And it was the starting point of the 'Reconquista', the effort to get the Muslim Saracens out of Spain and Sicily. The Grande Finale so to say was the first Crusade at the end of the 11th century.

A very interesting period, and Holland writes about it with infectious enthusiasm and his typical eye for entertaining details. I do have one gripe about the book though. Holland starts off at the wrong foot. Completely. In his introduction he sets out as his main theme the first big clash between church and state: the Walk to Canossa (Wiki). As he describes it you get the idea that the book will be about the first step to separation of church and state. The contrary is the case though. The real main story is the forging of mutually supporting bond between the Catholic church and the nation states. Canossa was a clash, but it was simply a way to get the rules straight: monarchs reign in the earthly realm and the pope is in charge of the heavens. This meant for example that kings can't ordain bishops and the church shouldn't want to act like a nation state. Neither side played by the rules though, and Canossa is just a famous example where they learned the hard way that they needed each other in order to have power. No Montesquieu here imho.

tl;dr Read the book if you want to learn more about the early history of Europe and the development of Christendom in an entertaining way.


Skaadi said:
The Rommel Papers - B. H. Liddell Hart

Just started reading this this morning, I was never too much into in depth accounts of war and government (with the exception of "Inside the Third Reich" by Albert Speer) but I'm finding the book is actually enjoyable. I love how Rommel recounts his military victories (especially the awesome stuff he did in WW1) almost without ego, but with the sort of attitude of a father trying to teach.

The letters to his wife make me a bit sad, considering how he died. Otherwise, its been a great read so far.
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Isn't Liddell Hart a bit condescending about Rommel? I always understood that he very much understated the importance of German developments in military doctrine. Haven't read anything by him though, so I can't really judge about that.
 
Hegemony Or Survival: America's Quest For Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky.

Biased obviously. But I must say this is one of the more entertaining books on political discussion. Even though his view is biased, I find some of his take on American Foreign policy spot on. But I read thisbook with a pinch of salt.

7/10
 
The Filth 8.5/10

This is a disturbing and chaotic and sad and amusing mess of a book. Where most books expand with a well defined structure and plot in a predictable fashion (though the events themselves may not be predictable) this one moves into a completely new direction, farther into the bizarre world which we do not truly understand. It's a metaphor so deep and complex I really don't think I could understand all its parts. You don't know what's real and you don't know what's happening, and in that regard, it reflects life wonderfully. Great book.
 
Vulcan 607 - Rowland White

White tells the tale of the men that made the first strike against the 'Argies' after their occupation of the Falklands. One Vulcan bomber accompanied by a fleet of Victor tanker airplanes flying over 9.000 miles to bomb a runway on a barren island in the South Atlantic. If that sounds like a lot of brouhaha to you, that is because -frankly- it is. The general depiction of the Falklands War is unashamedly biased, and the story of the planning and the execution of the mission reads like a novelization of The Dam Busters. And I must admit I quite enjoyed it. This is by no means a great book, but if you're in the mood for this kind of thing, you will finish it in two or three sittings. Especially recommended if you're into aviation.
 
The Forgotten Soldier - Guy Sajer
One of my Christmas prezzies this year (thank you Jimbo:)) was this book. According to the author it is a memoir of his time at the Eastern Front, fighting for ze Germans in the famous Gross Deutschland division. There is some discussion about how truthful the book is, because Sajer doesn't have all his facts straight. But regardless if it is factual or a novelization of his experience it is one hell of a read.

The book begins at the end of 1942, just before the Sixth Army was about to be crushed in the cauldron of Stalingrad. Sajer starts out in a logistics battalion, but not long after he is drafted into the Gross Deutschland and sent into combat. And combat is hell. At least, that was the impression I got from Sajer. This isn't a book about heroically fought battles. Sajer and his buddies just try to survive and dodge the Ivans as best as they can.

There is something uneasy to all that, in a way. Sajer is real sympathetic. He is a young kid (only 17 when he joins the Wehrmacht) lost in a war. While reading all the misery he went through, you really start to feel for him and for some of his buddies. And that basically comes down to rooting for the bad guys since Sajer is after all fighting in the name of Nazism.

But then again, this is more a book in the vein of All Quiet on the Western Front. Like Remarque Sajer is just a grunt and not participating in any of the atrocities the Nazis committed. His tale of survival his heartrending, gut wrenching and a very sobering if you are used to the Hollywood depiction of war. Must read imho.


You guiz need to post moar in this thread ...
 
Shakermaker said:
The Forgotten Soldier - Guy Sajer
One of my Christmas prezzies this year (thank you Jimbo:)) was this book. According to the author it is a memoir of his time at the Eastern Front, fighting for ze Germans in the famous Gross Deutschland division. There is some discussion about how truthful the book is, because Sajer doesn't have all his facts straight. But regardless if it is factual or a novelization of his experience it is one hell of a read.

The book begins at the end of 1942, just before the Sixth Army was about to be crushed in the cauldron of Stalingrad. Sajer starts out in a logistics battalion, but not long after he is drafted into the Gross Deutschland and sent into combat. And combat is hell. At least, that was the impression I got from Sajer. This isn't a book about heroically fought battles. Sajer and his buddies just try to survive and dodge the Ivans as best as they can.

There is something uneasy to all that, in a way. Sajer is real sympathetic. He is a young kid (only 17 when he joins the Wehrmacht) lost in a war. While reading all the misery he went through, you really start to feel for him and for some of his buddies. And that basically comes down to rooting for the bad guys since Sajer is after all fighting in the name of Nazism.

But then again, this is more a book in the vein of All Quiet on the Western Front. Like Remarque Sajer is just a grunt and not participating in any of the atrocities the Nazis committed. His tale of survival his heartrending, gut wrenching and a very sobering if you are used to the Hollywood depiction of war. Must read imho.


You guiz need to post moar in this thread ...
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I've read that, very good book.
 
SimpleAssassin said:
I can understand that. I wasn't a fan of all the characters and the courtroom scene frustrated the living **** out of me at times. I liked Meursault though, and his consistent indifference mostly for personal reasons. I would take coming away from this book hating it and everyone in it as a positive. It does say something about you as a person but for the better i would say.:)

And i still need to read A Scanner Darkly.
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I too, found Mersault to be a nauseating character. The entire think stunk of pretension to me, and I couldn't find myself caring about anything that was happening.

I think that was the point of the book though.
 
Damn, I completely forgot about this thread (which is incidentally one of the most content-rich threads this forum has ever seen).

Yorick said:
I can never decide which of the two (Do Androids Dream or A Scanner Darkly) I like better. They're both absolutely fantastic. A Scanner Darkly has like one paragraph that's one of my favourites out of any book ever. If my copy wasn't loaned out I'd spoiler tag the paragraph here.
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I still want to know what paragraph you're talking about.

Lets see, it's been months since I posted in this thread, so here we go:

from my Fyodor Dostoevsky course (90% of the volume of my reading for the past semester, leisure or otherwise):

- Poor Folk - very meh. Interesting, but very shallow compared to his later novels. It's fun to see him developing his style (this was his first novel) but a bit tedious and not entirely worthwhile. As far as I can tell, all he was trying to do was recreate the "little man" of Gogol's short story "The Overcoat" and frankly, it's a lot more rewarding to just read The Overcoat and leave it at that. Also, Akaky Akakievch is way cooler than Makar Devushkin. 5/10.

- The Double: A Petersburg Poem - Pure psychological Dostoevsky at his best. I'll go ahead and talk about Gogol again for a second, because this novel is Gogolian in the extreme, and unique among the rest of his works because of it. Very entertaining, totally worth reading, but again, not terribly "deep" like his later stuff. It does illustrate wonderfully Dostoevsky's grasp on the human condition and psychology. 6.5/10.

- Notes from the Underground - Finally, something to chew on. The real philosophical genius (or beast) of FD really begins to make itself known here. Thought provoking and interesting. I read this when I was much younger and didn't understand it at all (I just took it as a sort of existentialist manifesto then, which it sort of is, but that is certainly not what Dostoevsky wanted people to take away from it) so it was a pleasure to revisit it. In my oh so humble opinion this is the only REALLY worthwhile novel he wrote prior to being exiled to Siberia. 7/10.

- Crime and Punishment - Again, I read this when I was much younger and all of the thematic implications went straight over my head. Excellent, excellent novel. Dostoevsky in full force and one of the most compelling and gracefully constructed novels I have ever read. So many interesting characters. I love the cramped, oppressive feeling that permeates the entire book - lack of space, lack of freedom. Razumikhin is one of my favorite Dostoevsky characters period. Raskolnikov is a shitbag but what an interesting shitbag he is! 9/10.

- Demons - Meh. It has MANY wonderful moments but never really clicked for me for reasons I don't really understand. I had to read it for another literature course last year, and studying it again in context of his other work was rewarding but I can't put it anywhere near Brothers K or Crime and Punishment for some reason. 6.5/10.

- The Brothers Karamazov - The best book I've ever read, and I'm fairly confident it's the best book I ever will read. Everything it means to be human is addressed beautifully in this novel and... I'm going to stop before I gush for 3 pages. Just read it. READ IT. It is so very ****ing worth it. 11/10

I'm working on The Idiot right now, then moving onto The Gambler after that. I'm determined to have read every novel and short story he ever wrote by the end of 2010. I'm already halfway there.

Let's see, other than that... PKD's VALIS is sitting on my shelf right now, and I really want to crack that open. The Petty Demon by Fyodor Sologub was good, but not remotely titanic. Can't remember what else I've read recently so none of it must have really been worth talking about. I'm taking a course on Tolstoy next semester, cannot wait to get fully acquainted with him :D
 
"Notes from the Underground" was ****ing amazing.
 
It's sort of a prelude to Crime and Punishment. Chances are if you liked Notes from the Underground you'd really enjoy C+P. I recommend C+P in any case because it's way more digestible than any of his other truly epic novels (300-400 pages).
 
Yo Ennui you should read Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes since it is a direct response (or so I am told) to Crime and Punishment and also because independently it is a ****ing great novel
 
that just went in my oh so epic desktop txt.txt list of shit i need to watch/play/read/hear.
 
See also: everything else Conrad ever wrote ever.

Then again, I'm a total fanboy.

I'm looking forward to after I get my degree this June, when I will have time to finally read some Great Dead Russians.
 
The Road
9.9/10

An epic novel. The desolation, despair, and nihilism of this novel hit you like a truck. The absolutely honest realism makes you understand what an apocalypse would really be like: horrible.

However, the novel has some other important themes, namely: how we strive to be good in a cruel world, and how we pass on knowledge to children. It's really a remarkable novel.


Earth Abides
8.9/10

Another post-apocalyptic novel. This was one of the first plauge-based ones, from the 1950's. Though it reeks slightly of normal-rockwell-like 1950's optimism, its really an excellent novel.

Unlike most post-apocalyptic novels, this one focuses on the long-term growth of humanity after almost everyone has died. Its main theme is that civilization is ever-changing and ever adapting, while the world could care less about our presence. It also has a major biological theme, treating humanity as a biological system. It also has a few jabs at religion.

A Canticle for Leibowitz
8.5/10

If "Earth Abides" was about the long term results of an apocalypse, A Canticle for Leibowitz is about REALLY long term results. The novel spans several thousand years of human history after a global thermonuclear war. Humanity goes from Medieval-like dark ages in which the Catholic Church rules most of America and roaming nomadic tribes terrorize the countryside, to a Renaissance-like reformation in which science re-emerges and tries to make sense of the time before the apocalypse, and in which princes rule U.S. cities, and finally to another modern age that starts another nuclear war.

The novel suffers in its third act, which is quite frankly cheesy and silly. The first two acts, however, are extremely good. I especially love the Renaissance-era scientist's astonishment at the technologies acquired before the apocalypse, and their prideful confidence in obviously incorrect theories.
 
theotherguy said:
Earth Abides
8.9/10

Another post-apocalyptic novel. This was one of the first plauge-based ones, from the 1950's. Though it reeks slightly of normal-rockwell-like 1950's optimism, its really an excellent novel.

Unlike most post-apocalyptic novels, this one focuses on the long-term growth of humanity after almost everyone has died. Its main theme is that civilization is ever-changing and ever adapting, while the world could care less about our presence. It also has a major biological theme, treating humanity as a biological system. It also has a few jabs at religion.
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I started reading that book but completely lost interest when they went through like 50 years on a quick year-by-year basis. It was like "This year we planted corn. These kids were born. This person died. Our dog had puppies." I need more story and personal character interaction than that. But from your review, I presume it was worth getting through that and reading whatever came after it?

If you want another post-apocalyptic book, check out On the Beach by Nevil Shute. It's very mellow, pretty much the complete opposite of how The Road depicted the post-apocalypse. It's about people living in Australia after nuclear war has already wiped out the rest of the world, waiting around for the radioactive material to inevitably get blown south and wipe them out. They manage to keep society running and are mostly in denial that they're all going to die. One ship crew goes out to investigate signals they're picking up from America, but apart from that, nothing crazy really happens. Probably not the most realistic scenario, but worth reading.
 
A Canticle for Leibowitz is kickass book. I pretty much agree completely about the third act sucking, although the point Miller was trying to make with it is still pretty sound imo.
 
As long as I'm posting about how other people should read books I know instead of actually rating the books I've read recently, Riddley Walker is probably the most fantastic post-apocalyptic scenario I've encountered and for my money far better than Canticle. It's grubby, low-key and very British, featuring packs of wild dogs, a currency system based on marijuana, and bizarre vegetative mysticism. The way the plot is set up, it's almost a spoiler to say it's post-apocalyptic, but oh well. One more thing: the entire novel's written in a broken form of future English that you have to learn as you go along, and the way the language is formed offers enormous clues to the nature of the world.
 
dfc05 said:
I started reading that book but completely lost interest when they went through like 50 years on a quick year-by-year basis. It was like "This year we planted corn. These kids were born. This person died. Our dog had puppies." I need more story and personal character interaction than that. But from your review, I presume it was worth getting through that and reading whatever came after it?
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After that montage there are a couple of chapters about his life as "The Last American," and the semi-godlike status he is given by his grandchildren and great grandchildren. I thought the montage was a bit boring as well.
 
Spook Country - William Gibson

Maybe I should mentoin that I'm huge admirer of William Gibson's work, first his Neuromancer had a big influence in my teenage years, recently I become interested in his new (not so much cyberpunk) books. Pattern Recognition was better than I expected and Spook Country is set in the same universe (a contemporary world) and shares some of the characters (like an excellent, super rich media magnate Hubertus Bigend).
With this book Gibson added more action and more central characters, most of them are quite likeable - former rockstar, now journalist Hollis Henry, Cuban freelance spy Tito, junkie Milgrim and a neocon spook Brown. It starts of quite slow but it gets better when the novel's macguffin is introduced and characters paths are crossed. Things like Iraq war, war on terror, geospatial technologies are mentoined frequently and a lot of interesting stuff is explained in detail, things like locative art, systema CQC, Santería religion...
Definitely my favourite book but I liked Pattern Recognition better.
 
Warbie said:
Agreed. I love how stark and threadbare the movie is and cramming in content would have spoilt it. It also gives a reason beyond fleshing things out to read the book.
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No kidding. Awesome Book. Awesome movie. Too bad they are making an Americanized remake(!) of it ffs. :flame:
 
Batman Cataclysm / No Man's Land - Cataclysm was pretty decent, though disjointed and seemed to introduce characters for completely arbitrary reasons. However, it's still a good idea with decent execution. No Man's Land, however, is perhaps one of the best Batman comics ever.

Batman The Long Halloween / Dark Victory - It's clear to see where The Dark Knight got inspiration from in The Long Halloween, and I enjoyed the mystery quite a bit. Dark Victory on the other hand I found boring. It tries too hard to recreate The Long Halloween and just comes across as "more of the same". It also introduces Robin. What a terrible idea.

V for Vendetta - I enjoyed this, but overall I'm not sure I see what all the fuss is about. I think coming from the man who wrote Watchmen, I just expected something a bit more psychological and, well, interesting.

Factotum - I hadn't read any Bukowski before, and found it to be somewhat crude, though also rather funny. The portrayal of someone who clings to the precipice, not falling over but at the same time refusing to move from the edge was pretty intriguing.

Crime and Punishment - This was my first jump into Dostoevsky, or in fact any Russian Literature. I have to say that I found it a bit confusing, because of how many different names people go by, and even just Dostoevsky's writing style particularly when it comes to dialogue is somewhat hard to follow. That said, I absolutely loved it.
 
The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke

5/10

Earth is destroyed by a supernova, and sends out hundreds of slower-than-light colony ships to the stars in the 1000 year period before the sun explodes. The first ships are robotic "seed ships" that carry frozen human embryos and use traditional rocket engines. In the last decades, humanity develops the "Quantum Drive" which allows them to travel indefinitely at light speed. One of these later ships leaves the solar system just in time, and goes to a planet which had been colonized by a seed ship, and which was thought to have been lost -- but they discover a civilization has built up there, and there is some culture shock.

This book had a ton of great ideas, and exciting plot points that kept me reading, but as I quickly neared the end of this short novel, I realized that none of them would ever be resolved. Plot points are introduced in a paragraph, given slight mention in the next few chapters, and then quickly forgotten. It was almost as if Clarke started writing this book with a series of disjointed ideas on notecards and just threw them all together. I was not surprised to see that this novel was actually a collection of short stories from the 1950's that Clarke put together in the 80's. Each of these forgotten plot points was so interesting that it could have filled its own novel, but instead Clarke gives us two paragraphs on each!

Much of the novel focuses on the boring supporting characters and their trivial love lives. There are so many characters in this novel that none can be fully fleshed out, and when several of them die, I'm left without reason to care about it.

It's clear to me that Arthur C. Clarke is more comfortable writing about new technologies or future events than he is about writing plot and character development. Each of the bland characters in this book only exist to showcase one of the speculative technologies Clarke wants to introduce.
 
2150 A.D- by Thea Alexander
(interesting take on the macro-society and telekinesis and such)

read the book when i was 16 and it opened me up to a lot of metaphysics.

The God Delusion-by Richard Dawkins,

another amazing book, highly recommend it
 
Finally got around to reading Catch-22.

This has to be the god damn funniest book I've ever read.
 
Generation Kill - Evan Wright
One Bullet Away - Nate Fick

A big double whammy review since these books go well together. They describe the same events, but from slightly different perspectives. Generation Kill is the book the television series of the same name is based on. It is written by Evan Wright who covered the invasion of Iraq for Rolling Stone magazine. He was embedded in 1st Reconnaissance Battalion USMC, a unit that was on more than one occasion the most northernly positioned unit in Iraq.

The author of One Bullet Away was the lieutenant of the platoon Wright traveled with. In Generation Kill Fick comes off as one of the more intelligent officers in the battalion. He is the typical kind of lieutenant from Hollywood movies almost: professional, levelheaded, intelligent and caring for his men. On multiple occasions he defied orders if they were dangerous for his men and/or civilians, and his subordinates loved him for it.

Fick clearly emphasizes the military details more, while Wright has a very good eye for the social aspects, but together they paint a very complete picture of of the invasion (or at least the part they witnessed). What stands out is the sheer stupidity of command, mostly at mid-level. Fick's company commander for example doesn't even grasp the basics of fire and movement. And bear in mind: 1st Recon are the unofficial special forces of the Marines. The best of the best.

The humanitarian disaster is where both books are at their grimmest. Villages with old people and children getting blown up because of bad intelligence, phosphor bombings of towns, thousands of refugees fleeing from the fighting. But it is often contrasted with humor, especially in Wright's book. Wry, black humor mostly of course.

Generation Kill is clearly the better written book of the two. In my humble opinion it ranks up there with Dispatches by Michael Herr. But One Bullet Away is also a good read. Not as '**** yeah Amerikuh' as you might expect and very revealing of the emotions a junior officer goes through during a war. Both recommended.
 
Yorick said:
Crime and Punishment - This was my first jump into Dostoevsky, or in fact any Russian Literature. I have to say that I found it a bit confusing, because of how many different names people go by, and even just Dostoevsky's writing style particularly when it comes to dialogue is somewhat hard to follow. That said, I absolutely loved it.
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It takes your brain a bit of practice to make the switch to remembering Russian names like Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov or Sofia Semyonova Marmeladova but it's pretty simple really. People are usually referred to either by their last name (for males), their first + patronymic (Sofia Semyonova etc), or by a diminutive form of their first name (Rodya, Sonyetchka, etc). A lot of translations have character indexes in the front or back that can help clarify a bit.

Right now I'm reading War and Peace and getting completely swamped by the huge multitude of characters and their complex social/familial relationships. I swear this book introduces new characters every 2 pages, and there are about 1200 pages in all.

What translation did you read? If you read an older one like Constance Garnett (early 20th century translator) that might explain the dialogue being hard to follow. I've always found it pretty easy to keep up with (albeit verbose and overflowing and hyperprecise) but I generally read more contemporary translations like those by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

If you want to talk about THEMES and MEANING and all that with regards to C+P let me know, I love that shit.

Sulk thanks for the recommendation of Riddley Walker, I'm always on the look out for more postapoc stuff and I've not read that one. You should investigate Samuel R. Delany's book Dhalgren. I have two copies, if you want to pay postage I'm happy to give you one.
 
The Brothers Karamazov is another wonderful work by Dostoevsky.
 
Brothers K is my favorite novel ever written. I feel like I need to reread it about 10 times before I can start seriously commenting on it though.
 
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