I was listening to an episode of The Lex Fridman Podcast with Jordan Jonas, the person who won season 6 of the show Alone, and there was an interesting part where they started talking about the tenacity, resilience, and lyricism that people from Eastern Europe usually have due to the years of struggle they have endured and the sometimes catastrophic weather they receive throughout the year.
The conversation made me realize that those experiences would create a different kind of human from what we Dominicans are accustomed to. We deal with weather within a specific timeframe of the year. We have not dealt with government instability in years. Being a country so close to the United States makes our economy stable enough (at least for now).
I believe there is wisdom to be obtained from the writings and stories of people who have been through difficulties even if we are not living through any ourselves. For that reason, I choose to buy a bunch of books from Russian authors which curiously enough are almost all translated into English by the same couple.
I also took the moment to buy books by exurb1a, [qtnm](https://qntm.org/), Ray Nayler and Derek Sivers. I'm going to be reading these and posting the reviews as soon as I do.
I swear I won't buy more books until I read all of these. The books are:
- The Gulag Archipielago Vol 1-3 by Aleksandr Solhenitsyn
- What is Art? | Hadji Murat | Anna Karenina | War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The Brothers Karamazov | Notes from underground | Crime and Punishment | Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- Fifty-Two Stories | Selected Stories by Anton Chekhov
- Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
- Geometry for Ocelots | The Fifth Science | Poems for the lost by exurb1a
- How To Live | Hell Yeah or No by Derek Sivers
- Ra | There is no antimemetics division | Valuable Humans in Transit by qtnm
- The Tusks of Extinction | The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
I am also hearing in audiobook form The Chronicles of Narnia which are probably the next reviews I will be writing.
Thank you for reading!