br23 blog - minsk, belarus

I can’t stop noticing that in the last several years I’ve become quite unfocused and lazy when it comes to reading books, both fiction and non-fiction.
University provided me with some sort of mental discipline and a habit to read books, but I graduated in 2000, and since then it seems I’ve been reading much less. […]

Today, I started listening to a 6-hour long mp3 recording with the audio book Bill Clinton. My Life read by the author himself. It totally absorbed my attention. No matter what some Americans say, Clinton is an amazing personality, a brilliant politician (notwithstanding some problems), a really smart man. Such a striking contrast to the […]

During this presidential “election” I was reading William Golding’s Lord of the flies.
The book is essentially about “a bunch of children on deserted island revert to primitive ways.” English-speaking schoolchildren study it in high school and probably remember the main message of the book: the parody on Victorian “Coral island”, the inner corruption of […]

My most favorite sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem, died today in Kraków, Poland, at the age of 84. His books have been translated into 41 languages and sold over 27 million copies. At one point he was the most widely read science fiction author in the world.
I wrote about his books in this blog several months […]

Last week, br23.net had somewhat higher incoming traffic, as it was mentioned in an article in the British “Times” (“Washington’s denim revolutionaries”) and in the popular political blog Instapundit, run by Glenn Reynolds, a world-famous blogger. By the way, recently he wrote a book about blogging:
• An Army of Davids : How Markets and […]

Russian journalist: There’s a widespread (sic!) opinion that in the 21st century Russia will start collecting its “own” former territories. What do you think about that?
Sergei Lukyanenko: First of all, I would not put quotation marks around the word “own”! And I would not call them “former”, but “temporarily lost.” Yes, Russia will start getting […]

I think that Google Print is a wonderful project! And I totally agree with PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak that it should be nominated for Nobel Peace Prize for doing this, instead of getting all the flak from the publishers and writers…
Much Ado over Google Book Search
The fuss over this book-search initiative is idiotic […]

A mysterious panegyric verse on the arms of the famous [BLANK] family from the little-known New Testament published in the Holy Ghost Monastery in Vilnia (Vilnius) in 1623:

Клейнотъ гербовъ совытый, з двоякой цноты
Домом зацным неданы есть: пре дѣльность, труд, поты
Двема кресты з стрѣлою дом […] славных:
Бог, Свѣтъ, Моужство, Очизна, з вѣков стародавных
Вы выешыли: крестами врага […]

Robert Sheckley, a brilliant sci-fi master with comic and satiric mood, has died at the age of 77. I loved his short stories. He was pretty popular in Minsk (and former USSR in general, I think). I just wrote a short entry about him in the Belarusian Wikipedia.
A Russian media specialist who has a […]

“The Muscovites were waxing powerful, but were still vassals. It was in that period [14-15th centuries] that the Muscovites began to call their state by the Greek name for Rus’, Rossiya (Russia), and to call themselves Russians. These Muscovite-Russians had never ruled over Kiev; but the disability did not prevent them from regarding Moscow as […]