Sam
The Lord of the Rings is the epic. One cannot have a serious discussion about fantasy if they do not mention The Lord of the Rings. Many recent competitors have popped up (Harry Potter and Game of Thrones), but The Lord of the Rings will stand the test of time. Centuries from now, our descendants will point to The Lord of the Rings as the most epic tale ever written.
I concede it can be slow to read sometimes. But most of the book is very entertaining. History fans like myself will marvel at the depth of the world Tolkien creates, rich with millennia of its own lore.
There are also common criticisms with which I agree. The absolute distinction between good and evil is one. Generally, such a distinction will seem cheesy in many normal novels. Tolkien manages to still make an incredibly story in spite of this polarity.
Les Miserables is a fascinating story. Each character is very unique, and all of their experiences are delights to follow. With many historical flashbacks to Napoleon, in addition to the evident influences of French politics at the time, this book is a quintessential historical novel that history fans and novel lovers will love.
Like War and Peace, Hugo incorporates personal stories in a wider conflict. Nonetheless, these personal stories are much better written and received than Tolstoy's, in my opinion.
My history textbooks and English articles had always referred to the Russian Revolution and Civil War as a well-understood monolith of an event, but they never treated the events with any more detail. “The Russian Revolution caused Russia to exit World War I, and then they descended into a Civil War, and then Stalin!” I'm glad that Beevor wrote this astounding book, since it's part of a departure from the current oversight of the Anglophone histories.
Beevor elucidates the unimaginable scale of the terror and destruction brought about by the Civil War. Every person in every town had something to fear. The Cheka, unbelievably sadistic torture, “food detachments,” starvation, hypothermia, typhus, cholera, reprisals by retreating armies, looting by advancing armies, pogroms. Reading from the vantage point of a well-off American, I just can't comprehend the total suffering of the population. It's almost otherworldly. It's insane. It happened, and it's hard to grasp.
Beevor mostly focuses on the experience of the Whites. Now, although some may denounce him as biased or revisionist, the Whites' is a story too often overlooked. Beevor is primarily a military historian, but he examines the character of the White leadership in satisfying detail. In fact, he identifies it as perhaps the primary reason why the Whites lost the Civil War.
If you want to learn more about the Russian Revolution and Civil War, I can confidently say that you can look no further!
The funny thing is that this whole book is so perfectly encapsulated in this Dostoevsky quote:
“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
However, I can't agree with that.
The book, from a literary perspective, is absolutely outstanding. The writing is so crisp and clear. In other books, I often skip some passages that just lose my interest (cough, Dune, cough), but I felt engaged at all times while reading The Remains of the Day. The character development is just as phenomenal as Dostoevsky's. Emotional, moving, etc. etc. To put icing on the cake, the historical background related in the book made the amateur World War II historian in me exceedingly happy.
The only issue I have with this book is, well, its core message, as so perfectly summarized by Dostoevsky a century before it was written. Of course, if you see no issue at all with the quote, then by all means this is a must-read. Nonetheless, to me, the quote is nothing short of a fraud, however much I may profess my profound admiration for Dostoevsky. For there is no such thing as “one's own way.” “Your way” is already determined by your upbringing, by your nature. You are a deterministic function of your environment. As far as Stevens knew, all the way until that last evening in the end of the book, he was following his own way. He could never have known better. Still, I am glad he recognized that it's no good wallowing in melancholy for supposedly “failing to follow one's own way.”
Even though I rate it four stars out of philosophical disagreements, I can heartily recommend this book to anyone, whether you have such disagreements or not. As a final note, I imagine that the book is far more touching to those older than I am (having read The Remains of the Day at age 21). I will certainly be re-reading this book at least every decade of my life.