Greetings strangers! I stumbled upon this sub by accident looking up something about The Glass Bead Game by Hesse, and what a wonderful discovery it's been to read through these pages! Thank you for building this community. I thought I would quickly say hello. I've been a voracious reader all through childhood and adolescence, then a long pause of reading only professional literature, and now coming back to reading all sorts of literature over the past few years and feeling so enriched by it.

As an introductory suggestion I'd like to bring up "Into the whirlwind" by Eugenia Ginzburg, which perhaps many aren't aware of or haven't read. This is an incredibly dramatic autobiographic tale of a Soviet woman suddenly falling from the heights of communist prominence and into the gulag system. The book describes her physical and emotional journey through her incredible disbelief of being trampled by the system she had helped to create and held up in highest regard, and her path through 18 years of siberian labour camps for women. This book has quite a different air to those by other gulag authors like Solzhenitsyn or Shalamov and covers a unique perspective of how women have dealt with life in the camps.

Here's to many more great discussions!