The Bookshelf

          “Men often think they deserve a sticker for treating women like people.” Page 29 Taylor Jenkins Reid is the master of writing riveting stories with complex characters and profound passages, this book was no exception. Daisy Jones and The Six is an enigmatic novel about a band's rise to fame during the mid sixties - late seventies. This book goes through how Daisy Jones and The Six became one of the most famous bands in the world before suddenly splitting in 1977. The story is told in a very unique way, through a “transcript of interviews” where readers get to learn first hand accounts of the band from bandmembers, friends, and family.  The book starts with someone interviewing people involved with Daisy Jones and The Six. Daisy Jones is described as a solo artist, while at the same time, a small band called the Dunne Brothers were trying to earn their big break. Over a series of events the aspiring rock artists meet and eventually form th...

In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , Alexander Solzhenitsyn details the life of a Russian prisoner for exactly one day, but what a day it is. We “meet” Ivan Denisovich, a prisoner or a zek , in a Soviet Gulag (hard-labor camp) in the early 1950s. Ivan has served part of his ten-year sentence of exactly 3,653 days. The unnamed camp in this book is located in the steppe, a brutally barren and frozen land located in far Eastern Europe or Central Asia. Despite this book covering only one day in Ivan’s prison life, it is a day of extraordinary hardship, humiliation, competition, luck, boredom, horror, and eking by to survive. Perhaps the most important element in One Day in the Life is the psychological game that prisoners suffer day to day and minute by minute: the mind obsesses over tiny and momentous things at the same time. Every morning at about 7 am, a hammer is struck on a metal rod. That is reveille, and for the next 90 minutes zeks wait until the guards open the doors to le...