297 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life ..."

Along with special guest Longinus, the boys drink and review Beam Me up, Stouty (a coconut stout) from Saugatuck Brewing, then discuss "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."  The story is not about an escape, or an unusual day, or how something dramatic happened on this day. It's just a typical day in a Soviet labor camp.  Solzhenitsyn's account of this one day so captured the experience of the Soviet prisoner camps that he received letters from former prisoners expressing how perfectly he had captured the experience.  The characters themselves are not particularly wicked. You don't come away hating the characters in the story, but the system. It's all about ordinary, decent people caught up in a wicked system.  It's a cold story. You might want to bundle up as you read it.