going to the bookstore

I wanted absorbing, huge, complex, novels of substance. Believable characters who spoke like real people, real people caught up in their lives, inadvertantly or deliberately caught up in the crushing politics of the day. Secretly, I started reading Russian literature. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak. It was and is like crawling back in time, being there. Tolstoy writes so well, his women speak like women, not like what men think they hear women say. Everything, every glimpse of the wolrd they live in and hide from is so present, so unparalleled by what I read now. Some periods of your life color you, color your world, color your tastes, set up unreachable expectations for every book that follows. You just have to let other books be other books. They can't all be A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.