Very, very funny. ( )

At times a little too self consciously observer of the details. Objective interested inquiry into the quirks of any insular world, still, the academic world of Slavic literature is rife for such observations. There is a somber and beleaguered tone, but in the end comes back to a love of literature, a love of Russian literature. She obviously gets the humor of Russian literature (at least as I do) but lacks the vitality in her own writing which I attest to a sort of david Foster Wallace post modernism. I have particular interest in her topics, but not a book for everyone. A bit too recursively intellectual, is my Bourdieu-esque take on the thing. Ha. Ha.

Every morning I called Aeroflot to ask about my suitcase. "Oh, it's you," sighed the clerk, "Yes, I have your request right here. Address: Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's house. When we find the suitcase we will send it to you. In the meantime, are you familiar with our Russian phrase resignation of the soul?

This is a collection of personal essays centering on Batuman's time working towards her Ph.D in Russian literature. She goes to a Tolstoy conference in Russia, helps host a Babel conference at Stanford University and studies Uzbek in Samarkand for a summer and tours the more obscure corners of Turkey for Let's Go.

Batuman is a likable main character in her accounts. She appears to be a hapless victim of circumstance, having accidentally fallen into Russian literature, but she's also someone who is relentlessly curious about the world around her and willing to jump into circumstances most people would balk at. She cheerfully endures weird and trying experiences and turns them into funny stories. My favorite essays are the ones set during her summer in Samarkand, a city which sounds endlessly exotic, but is also in a former Soviet satellite state still struggling to regain its feet. Most of the stories are set among graduate students and visiting scholars and if that sounds even halfway interesting to you, this is a book you'll like; it's witty and intelligent and has a great sense of the absurd. And if you've read either of her novels, you'll get to read about the experiences that she later fictionalized. ( )

The Possessed is a book for lit geeks. I loved it. ( )

Memoir/essays from the author’s grad school days, at Stanford and in various spots in Europe. Weird, obscure, literary, and very, very funny in a dry way. I didn’t always follow what I was reading but it was amazing to live in her world for a few hours. ( )