Morphoria Design Collective Design Collective itibaren Stare Czaple, Polonya itibaren Stare Czaple, Polonya

Bu şimdiye kadar okuduğum en şaşırtıcı kitaplardan biri! Küçük baskı ile biraz korkutucu ama çok iyi yazılmış ve zorlayıcıydı. Sadece çok seçkin ve üzgün, ama olağanüstü bir kitap.

Okuduğum en iyi distopyalılardan biri.

I doubt I have ever read a book that had as significant an impact on me, and my act of reading it had on others, as this one. Conversations like this were frequent: Someone, upon seeing me reading my Kindle, would ask what I am reading. “War and Peace.” “Oh. . . uhm, wow.” “Yeah, it’s great. I’m reading it for fun.” “Uhm, OK then, see you later. . .” It seems to be so revered, and also so loathed, that I had to read it. At 1400 pages, it took me 8 months to finish, though I read several other entire books in that time. I feel rather unequal to the task of expressing how this book impacted me, let alone a review of it. And nonetheless, I also feel I would be remiss if I let it go past saying nothing. I was struck by so many things as I read War and Peace. Some of them I won’t mention here and hope to turn into their own blog posts. Of the others, I felt I gained some sense of how the nobility and serfs in Russia (and, to a certain extent, Europe) thought about life, their position, and how things ran. Being a modern Kansan, this thought process was not familiar to me, and though I head read about it in history texts before, felt far more informed having read it in Tolstoy’s novel. Although much of the novel centers around Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, the work as a whole spans nearly two decades of time. Tolstoy’s characters aren’t static; they change over time. Some, yes, die; others go through hardships and triumphs that change them to their core. It evoked a feeling of nostalgia in me at times — for the younger, childlike Natasha who was so full of simple delight in life. But then, a thousand pages later, the older Pierre finally was able to find simple delight in life too. Sometimes I have missed on the simple joy of being, and Jacob or Oliver or Terah remind me of that. Today Oliver and I read a book together, one that we read often, and we discovered an illustration of a tiny worm we had never noticed before. And the worm had a red hat (“hat” is one of Oliver’s favorite words right now.) The happy laughter as he pointed at the tiny hat, saying “hat” over and over, reminds me that sometimes children know how to live better than adults. Jacob later asked me how my day was, and I told him how I read a book on my Kindle, where I sat, and how I even read it lying down on the couch for a bit. At that he too laughed. As with some other wonderful, engrossing books, I was sad to reach the end of this one. I felt as if I was leaving a conversation early; fictional characters, yes, but their story wasn’t over. And really, that was part of Tolstoy’s point: things don’t happen in isolation, and stories don’t have clearly-defined start and end points. The novel touched on politics, religion, philosophy, free will, and just about every topic imaginable. It is, really, unfair to call it a just a novel. Reprinted from my blog post - more detail is there as well.

I've been listening to this over the last 2 days and couldn't put it down at first. By chapter 9 I was hoping for more rebellious behavior towards the Capital and was disappointed that the remaining candidates didn't band together. I was completely repulsed by the ending of the last competitor. I am looking forward to "Catching Fire" only because it means there might be some sort if uprising. I haven't read the synopsis yet so I could be completely wrong.