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Comment by tagoregrtst | Hacker News Reader

Alexander Solzhenitsyn believed he cured himself of cancer by following the instructions of a shaman. He then wrote of his experience in “Cancer Ward”

Years later a Solzhenitsyn fan who worked for the NIH recreated the shaman’s recipe and long and behold it was a cocktail of the most promising cancer fighting chemicals the NIH was investigating at the correct dose!

[1] https://undark.org/2016/03/31/did-solzhenitsyn-cure-his-own-...

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That was an amazing story. Thanks for the link!

If you liked the link, read Solzhenitsyn. Amazing.

But start with “A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich”, short and to the point and skip the Gulag.

The Gulag is brilliant, but its too long and depressing (Ive never made it past half way through the first book).

Also, keep in mind the fundamental difficulty of Russian novels: each character has a half dozen names, nicknames or variations of their name. Keep the wikipedia page open so you can look up the characters!

I did read that book but did not finish it. Got stuck in the gulag part. I did not know there was anything after it.

I think you may have misunderstood: Denisovich is pretty much all about his life (as the title says, a day thereof) in a Gulag. Perhaps a page or three of more general musings at the very end. And that's all there is to it, The End, nothing more after that -- it is just "the gulag part".

What you should skip, as I read the recommendation, is The Gulag Archipelago, a separate multi-volume (at least a trilogy, maybe much more) epic about the Gulag system in general and, I gather (but may be wrong) more explicitly based on Solzhenitsyn's own life therein. FWIW, I agree with this recommendation.

> The Gulag is brilliant, but its too long and depressing (Ive never made it past half way through the first book).

Well look at that, common ground! I've always been a compulsive reader -- up until I was about forty, forty-five, an obsessive-compulsive one: if I'd started a book, I'd finish it.

Except for a very few works. Weirdly, come to think of it, all three (that I can recall now) of them were recommendations from my best friend since lower-middle school, whose taste I still trust and whose recommendations I'd still follow -- but whose literary stamina I apparently lack.

We were assigned to read Denisovich in or just before our lower teens, and I found it quite good and interesting. After that, he read The Gulag Archipelago and said it was good, so I tried... That's the first book I can recall giving up on.

Sometime in our teens we read TLOTR, which he followed up with The Silmarillion. Strike two. Then, sometime in our twenties or thirties, he recommended Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Strike three (and you're out?).

I'm tempted by -- but dreading! -- Stephen King's The Dark Tower... OTOH, lots of other people also seem to be recommending that. And I've gotten past "my gotta finish it" fixation. So maybe, after all.