Books for grownups
When the power goes out I read Russian science fiction novels, apparently.
Having an internet connection makes it more difficult to finish them. But I finally finished We, which was apparently the primary influence on both 1984 and Brave New World. Also Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (the author tells us) but I haven't read that.
It's one of those books I've seen on shelves for a while and always knew I'd wind up reading. It's tough going, not least because the guy who wrote it wasn't a novelist, but it's the sort of story that clearly badly needed to be written at the time it was written.
It gets harder as a person gets older to find decent writing, and so the reading one does tends to take the form of the older books, the ones that have survived long decades, while other lesser works have fallen by the wayside. We was written in 1920. The copy I had was published in 2006.
Wikipedia tells me that We is one of two books that ushered in the genre of dystopian future fiction. It's pretty weird that although I'd seen it around, I'd never really heard much about it at all. I'm glad I read it and I'm glad the power went out so I had a chance to finish it.
The other book I read during the last outage was Roadside Picnic. Also very awesome, totally worth reading (and much easier to get through). Actually come to think of it, these may be the only works of Russian lit I've ever read.