Books

Recently, I received a few books as presents. I'm still keeping from reading Stardust and Wizard's First Rule, since I started something else before them, though, but... The other book I received was a collection of short stories by award-winning Russian authors of recent years. After reading them, I started reading a biographic novel about child criminal upbringing in the 1920ies, written by the man that was running the "colony". Published in 1957. Reading of these two compels me to write a bit of a rant.

First of all... There seem to be no writers left in Russia. The short stories are written nicely, there's some originality of style and a few interesting solutions in terms of stream of conscience-type of writing. However, they're all not even new - I've read stream of conscience stories on my first year of university as an intro course. But that's not the problem. Problem is, they're stories about nothing. N-o-t-h-i-n-g. There's no actual point to them. Things just go and happen. Poof. Lovely. Just a show-off of how someone can "awesomely write". Only a couple of stories actually were of some kind of point and were relatively interesting to read, the rest was a chore and a bother. That is, until I got to the last author. This is where I went "WTF?" and kept on reading only to see if the rest of the texts would be the same. They were.

You see, apparently, what the humans, according to the Author are, are engaging in either acts or talks of acts of Author's inflamed sexual fantasies. Disgusting crap. But even more disgusting was his last short story with some sort of moralizing in it. Ugh.

Now, the correctional facility biography book is actually awesome. Communist approach to their plan of creating a new human through new means. No, it has no violence, soap-dropping scenes or anything else. It's a book about an approach taken to change young street criminals to the kind of people that fit into a society. And it's done successfully.