The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment In Literary Investigation, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1973 (701pgs)
This is doom-scrolling in literary form. If you wonder how much worse things can get, Solzhenitsyn’s justifiably-famous expose offers a master class in possibility. Springing from what was sold as an effort to build a utopia, the system Solzhenitsyn describes is instead one of terror, suffering and murder on a massive scale. His writing should be a required reading for anyone with blithe dreams of overthrowing the status quo and replacing it with something revolutionary. This is why norms and institutions matter. And why and how the slow and creeping replacement of principle with the pursuit of power, unbounded by humility or effective limits, can and will end in tragedy on a massive scale.
Nonfiction. Total: 8/10