A Gentleman in Moscow
by Amor Towles
goodreads.com/book/show/294 … -in-moscow
Read it already.
I actually came to enjoy this book so much though at first I was a little bit bored with it - too light, slow, no action lol
“By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.”
“Dutifully, the Count put the spoon in his mouth. In an instant, there was the familiar sweetness of fresh honey—sunlit, golden, and gay. Given the time of year, the Count was expecting this first impression to be followed by a hint of lilacs from the Alexander Gardens or cherry blossoms from the Garden Ring. But as the elixir dissolved on his tongue, the Count became aware of something else entirely. Rather than the flowering trees of Central Moscow, the honey had a hint of a grassy riverbank…the trace of a summer breeze…a suggestion of a pergola…But most of all there was the unmistakable essence of a thousand apple trees in bloom.
“Nizhny Novgorod”, he said.
And it was.”
“Who would have imagined,” he said, “when you were sentenced to life in the Metropol all those years ago, that you had just become the luckiest man in all of Russia.”
That last quote is the true beauty and meaning and essence of the book. What a beautiful character he was.
The same with the book
Beneath a Scarlet Sky
by Mark Sullivan
marksullivanbooks.com/beneath-a-scarlet-sky/
It is amazing how truly heroic so many human beings can be ~ I mean real heroes.