Group Read, July 2019: The First Circle

Our group read for July 2019 is The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Please join in the read and post any comments on this thread.

We have had a group read of this book previously, in December 2016. If you would like to read what we thought of it then follow the link here

I will be starting this in a few days, maybe on the weekend. I need to finish A Confederacy of Dunces and my monthly challenges first.

I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich a long, long, long time ago.

I started the book today, I have enjoyed other books by the author - if enjoy is a word you can use about gulags and Stalin's Russia. There is a lot of absurdity in the situations portrayed, especially in the paranoia, but that doesn't make it any less realistic.

I will start today (after Wimbledon Ladies' Quarterfinals!).

My book appears to be in Library Limbo. in one place it is "in transit" in another it is now an overdue loan. Who knows when I'll get round to reading it.

I started reading this on the 10th and I have a feeling it may take me the rest of July to finish it. I am enjoying it but thank goodness for the cast of characters listing at the beginning. One of the problems I always have with Russian novels is figuring out which person is referred to when they use a patronymic or shortened version of the first name but the listing provides all the different variations that may occur.

Incidentally my copy says it is the first full English edition. I guess Solzhenitzyn had to remove some chapters in order to get it published when it first came out.

Well I've finished this. Whew 16 days to read one book! However I was never uninterested in what I was reading. In fact I consider this one of the best 1001 books I have read. It explains so much about the USSR under Stalin. I knew Stalin was a horrible brutal man but since he died about 6 months before I was born I didn't have any contemporary knowledge of him.

I put off starting this until last week because I thought it would be dreary and uninteresting. Boy, I was wrong! It is completely engrossing. I might finish it by the end of the day!

My copy had been staring at me from my shelves for a long while. The author packs a lot of detail into thw book, I did look up a number of references online. His writing is not dry, the areas of grey in the book provoked thoughtful reading.