Reading Germinal by Emile Zola right now. From time to time it gets a bit too dry and reads more like political theory than fiction, but overall I’m enjoying it a lot. Got about 100 pages left and it seems like it’ll end in tragedy, but that was to be expected from the start.

I love the way Zola describes things. The darkness, the cold, the mines that are more like man-eating beasts than mere workplaces, make you really feel the tragic plight of the workers there.

It is also quite depressing to me how many lines I can draw from what I’m reading to what I’m hearing in my own life. The fight hasn’t really changed and the arguments that I hear also haven’t.

Probably gonna finish it this week and not sure what’s next, but I can definitely recommend this to anyone interested in politics and social justice. It feels very realistic (who would have thought, it’s realist/naturalist literature after all) and makes for a great fictional adaptation of the often pretty dry political theory on communism and socialism at the time.