Reddit reviews One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

I recommend against starting with Gulag, I recall it being pretty long and dense.

Start with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It's only 100 pages long and an easy read.

http://www.amazon.com/One-Day-Life-Ivan-Denisovich/dp/0451228146

• Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin Series
  
  
• The travel writing of Eric Newby
  
  
• Seven Years in Tibet
  
  
• I Capture the Castle. Personally haven't read it, but it's my sister's all time favorite book.
  
  
• War and Peace. No, really. You should read it. I'm being completely serious.
  
  
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

In March, I read some novels for a change!

Famous Men Who Never Lived, a (I think debut) novel by K Chess. It's a sci-fi novel about being an interdimensional refugee. It was slight, but good while it lasted, and thoughtful. Some guy at a mexican restaurant wanted to know if it was about, like Robin Hood. Don't judge a book by its cover.

The City In The Middle Of The Night, by Charlie Jane Anders. This is a follow-two-people-and-meet-in-the-middle science fiction book set on a planet that doesn't rotate and people are forced to live right on the terminator line. It's got some good horror elements and puts some interesting thought into its setting. The story doesn't go where you think it's going, but you'll like where it goes (probably.)

Roadside Picnic, a classic piece of Russian science fiction, which people are probably more familiar with from the things it inspired, like Tarkovsky's film Stalker, and then the STALKER video games that came from that. Aliens visited our planet, but they didn't notice us. They left their trash behind. Bleak in a very Russian way. Excellent.

One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denosovich, the book that shocked the USSR by not being samizdat. It's a slim little thing but says a lot.

Hostage by Guy Delisle. This is the "unusual one" for Delisle, whose books are little sketches of life - it's a telling of someone else's story. This dude was kidnapped by Chechens and held hostage for about three months in 1997, until he escaped. An excellent and baffling story, with excellent artwork.

The Gulag Archipelago

It's extremely long and I'm afraid I have no idea where that particular anecdote is in the book. That link is to just the first three parts. I'm not sure which translation I used because I actually listened to the audiobook version, which is well done (some British fellow with a crisp accent and a wry inflection). It is filled with marvelous stories.

If you want something shorter to start out with you could try One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which is about life in the Gulag.

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

It documents the history of penal camps used by the Soviet Union to squelch political dissidents, terrorize the populace, and get slave labor.

If you've read read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and want to learn more, pick up The Gulag Archipelago.

Don't go for the unabridged version, it's another 2000 pages.

Here's a short book, easy to read, and awesome: A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich. It's about a guy in the Russian prisons (GULAGs) and it's a fast easy read. Also won the author a Nobel Prize.

All set in or over the communist era.

China:

Wild Swans

Life and Death in Shanghai

Russia:

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

The Long Walk.