Currently reading, lol lmao edition

Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Svejk
So far, it makes for quite the companion piece to The Radetzky March. The latter is elegant, haunting, really driving into how the world was and what was lost. Svejk, on the other hand, kept the satire under constraint for 80 pages or so and is now "lol, lmfao, can you believe these idiots thought this war was a good idea?"
With distance and the diminishment of time, moral judgments can become hazy, and there's a morally lazy tendency to believe that things were complicated back then and we shouldn't judge. But as I emphasize to the kinder, there is always, at any time, someone who is there and writing and perfectly well aware that a wrong thing is wrong. So this particular novel seems to be.

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
Friends, I don't know if I'm going to be able to keep this one up. Lots of memorable characters, sure, but no clear indication of how they're going to interact, except that the dead person whose death kicks off the story is obviously not dead. The only mystery here is whether it's worth 600 more pages to find out.
(Getting paid by the word remains undefeated, as always with Dickens. I will say there is a certain sharpness to some of it that can be pleasing--he has a way with words and images--but there's just so much of it, and all in the same tone.)

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
One must have a tolerance for very long party scenes, but at least this one has Some Things Happening. In particular, there seems to be a retrenchment around Dreyfus' guilt even though it has been mostly established that he was fraudulently convicted in the first place. I can't say I exactly enjoy reading about people justifying to themselves the poor treatment of an innocent man because they would otherwise have to revisit their political and social beliefs, but I find it to be more persuasively written than I might have ten years ago.

Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance
We're in Sweden now, in early 1939, and trying to figure out how to be politically active in a state that is trying to prevent anyone from doing anything political, closing potential humanitarian loopholes, and deporting people like it's their job. As above, I can't say I enjoy it, but I can confirm its essential accuracy.