Red Rising

Red Rising by Pierce Brown is another book that I've seen being recommended. It and its sequels are available here in libraries so I decided to check out the first one. I didn't look any more to what kind of books they were but the quote on the cover from Scott Sigler told me exactly what I was about to read: "Ender, Katniss, and now Darrow."

Atlas Shrugged

I remember how in 2017 I read in a newspaper that Atlas Shrugged had been translated into Finnish, 60 years after its original publication. I had seen the novel mentioned here and there before, which usually signifies a classic. I thought it was kind of an oddly long wait for such a book to get a translation. Maybe the novel's resurgence after the 2007 financial crisis had something to do with it finally getting a Finnish print: evidently just in 2011 Atlas Shrugged's English editions sold nearly half a million copies which I think is impressive for an old book.

Fahrenheit 451

I don't know why I had expected Fahrenheit 451 to be bad. But as it turned out to be an entertaining and good read, I was pleasantly surprised. I had read Ray Bradbury's work before -- one or two short story anthologies at least -- but that was like two decades ago. That's a way too long time to remember what they were about or how was Bradbury's writing style.

Brave New World (and briefly of Animal Farm)

The Finnish title for Brave New World by Aldous Huxley bothers me. Not because Uljas uusi maailma is a mistranslation but because the identical word order in Finnish sounds clumsy to me. You have to emphasize the end of uljas to avoid muddling the consonant to the following word. Uusi uljas maailma instead rolls off the tongue more naturally and I've seen others accidentally calling the book by that name too. But even if the translator thought so as well, they probably wanted to keep the title matching to an earlier translation of William Shakespeare's Tempest: "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, / That has such people in't."

Nineteen Eighty-Four (and briefly of Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

I was at one of the local libraries recently. There's a shelf for newly returned books, divided into genres. I checked the scifi/fantasy section to see what people were reading and to my amusement was reminded of a picture (or two) I had seen of someone moving George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four from their fiction section to non-fiction. I didn't move the book to non-fiction but instead picked it to read it myself as I had never done so.