We are currently highlighting our display - Around the World with Books - featuring novels for travelers. This week we want to draw your attention to Russian classic fiction.
Though implausible, the most chortlingly funny book I’ve read in years is about graduate school. Elif Batuman - 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: My 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