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Reading Diaries #2: On The Contrary to Freedom Nov 2024: 'Love in the Time of Cholera'

photo credit: Cait Malilay Nov. 2024 (from the unpublished drafts) "Love in the Time of Cholera." I've had this book for about 4 years now. It was sitting on my shelf unread until last Spring. I annotated the heck out of it, yet I still have yet to complete it. Here I find myself, over a year later, and still haven't returned to it. After a little over 200 pages in, I stopped because, well, I felt that the plot was just moving way too slow and the story was getting a little too repetitive. In sum, it's basically about a guy named Florentino Aziza, who is a hopeless romantic that becomes intoxicated by the beauty of Fermina Daza. He was only 18 years old. He becomes so obsessed with her, follows her, and despite her choosing a far wealthier man who is a doctor over him, he reserves her heart for her over a span of 50 years. However, that isn't to say that he hadn't had his fair share of love affairs (622 to be precise). The first time I heard about "Lo...

Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy (Part I) Review: Knowledge leads to power, but not necessarily justice

photo credit: Cait Malilay "Though hundreds of thousands had done their very best to disfigure the small piece of land on which they were crowded together, by paving the ground with stones, scraping away every vestige of vegetation, cutting down the trees, turning away birds and beasts, and filling the air with the smoke of naphtha and coal, still spring was spring, even in the town." - (Tolstoy 5) "Resurrection" was Leo Tolstoy's last written novel published in 1899. Told in the third person perspective, the book centers on a nobleman named Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov, whose values are tested when he by chance reconnects with someone from his past, someone he once loved and betrayed. The book's first chapter has strong similarities to that of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" with its opening passages of a prison and society focused on the fate of a fallen woman.  We are introduced to Maslova, also known as "Katusha," who i...