It's Friday: Bookshelf Travelling for Insane Times Week 2

Correction: An error in my previous post. An epistolary novel,  is one that is composed of letters or correspondence among people, NOT a diary or  journals as I stated yesterday. So the David Downing novel that Ken has just finished reading followed the course of the narrator's journal or diary. I'm slipping!
Friday's Bookshelf is in a room that I call my studio. It's a room where I do art stuff (painting or dabbling in watercolors, pastels, oil pastels, colored pencils, and acrylics), sewing. It's also a place where I store supplies, books, and magazines for and about art, artists, and artwork, knitting, fabric art, sewing, and quilting.
Yet I have one large bookcase in the studio that is totally out of sync with the rest of the room. Four of the five shelves hold classic novels.

And one shelf is devoted to nonfiction about Russia, and both fiction and nonfiction about the Soviet Union. I would really like to get going reading the TBRs on this shelf. For example, I still haven't read the 300-year-history of the Romanov dynasty, published in 2016, entitled simply The Romanovs by the historian Simon Montefiore. The book was widely acclaimed by historians and general readers, and it has a 4.06 rating on Goodreads. Sitting by its side on the shelf is a book I read in 2014, The Romanov Sisters, which was spell-binding and incredibly sad, and which I wrote about here.

I'm so glad I examined this bookshelf today, because it's reminded me how much I have been wanting to read the work of Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015. Alexievich is a journalist from Belarus. Her most well-known book in the West may be Voices from Chernobyl. I don't own that one, though I read it, and it was remarkable.
The book that's on my shelf is Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets: An Oral History, which was published originally in 2013, but was not translated into English and published until 2016. It chronicles the experiences of men and women from the time of the death of Stalin (1953), through the days of the fall of Soviet rule in 1991, through the days adjusting to the new regime through 2012. Many reviews and blurbs state that the book includes the people's views of life after communism, but that is not entirely accurate. The voices include many, many stories about life under Communism as well.  The book has a 4.4 rating on Goodreads, and the vast majority of reviewers gave the book 5 stars.

My last book is a novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Big Green Tent, published in 2015 in the U.S., although in 2010 in Russia.  Please follow the link. I'm afraid I've run out of steam for the moment! This novel also has a high score on Goodreads. I wish I could add more info tonight.

So what was the inspiration to tackle this particular bookshelf this week?
As I think I noted in a post earlier this month, I borrowed and then purchased a book about Svetlana, the daughter of Josef Stalin. I'm still waiting for it to arrive.  THEN: I got caught up in a huge desire to read the eminent American historian Anne Applebaum's award-winning book Gulag, which relates the history of the Soviet camps from Lenin's day forwards through 1953, which was the year Stalin died and these prison//labor camps were dismantled. Actually, Applebaum does much more than relate the history. She relates the history through the scores of memoirs she has read by survivors, the interviews she conducted--this book was a monumental feat. I'm sure you will hear more. Because according to experts, the facts Applebaum uncovered in Soviet and Russian archives were not know in the West until her publication. Awesome stuff.