If you've seen one, you've seen them all

The thing about certain types of novels is that, really, if you have read a couple of them there isn't much need to read any more. You get it, and everything else is just sort of repeating over and over again. Both of these novels felt that way to me. Now, I totally acknowledge that this might just be me and others may feel completely differently.

Let's start with Cancer Ward, which is a very, very Russian novel. I read some criticism on this one (not much, but a teeny-tiny bit), and one of the commentators mentioned that Solzhenitsyn feels of the wrong era, he really belongs with Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, which I think is fair. It's an almost disorienting experience to read this one, because it does feel like it's too modern in setting given it's style. Essentially, it's an allegory for the body politic, specifically the USSR, and the idea that the moral blights of the USSR and Stalinism are like tumors in a human body, spreading, destroying, and corrupting the whole body.

It's actually an amazing allegory and very well crafted, but it's also as bleak as it sounds. Which is to say, bleak even for a Russian novel. It's also, apparently, pretty autobiographical, which actually just makes it more depressing. So yes, a good read, but not a fun read. Not even in the same neighborhood or even general part of the world as a fun read.

Now let's talk about A Tale of a Tub. To me, this one belongs to the series of "novels" that really mostly just show how far novels have come. And let's just say that I'm very grateful that we've come this far, or there is no way that I'd be doing this list project. I just get nothing out of these really old ones. They make me crazy, they are so boring, and they are so awkward. This one literally has a series of interruptions every other chapter where Swift sort of just babbles on about something or another, which makes it feel like a NaNoWriMo. I don't think satires often hold up to well. Anyway, glad to be done with it.