Elif Batuman's Russian Literature Recommendations

Though implausible, the most chortlingly funny book I’ve read in years is about graduate school. Elif Batuman - a blogger, New Yorker writer, and madcap academic - is a disarming story-teller; her relentless enthusiasm for books is contagious. In the seven essays of THE POSSESSED: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15), Batuman recaps her immoderate enamorment with Russian literature and how this love leads her to Stanford’s Comp Lit department and a cohort which she likens to the spiraling madness of Dostoevsky’s Demons (a.k.a. The Possessed). Her love also takes her farther afield, to a mystifying summer in Samarkand studying Old Uzbek epics; to an International Tolstoy Scholars Conference and suspicions of foul play; and to the Neva River to investigate the curiously sinister backstory of an ice palace for The New Yorker. Familiarity with Babel and Bakunin aren’t prerequisites; Batuman’s book is a clever treatise on the reasons we read. - Lila Stiff