The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

In her debut memoir, originally published in 2010 and now available in the audio format, Batuman revisits her seven years as a grad student in Stanford’s comp lit program, where she focused on Russian novelists. Chapters on Babel, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and other great Russian writers alternate with chapters describing a summer the author spent studying Uzbek in Samarkand. Batuman’s narration, like her prose, is charming and self-deprecating, and she deftly navigates the book’s many Russian names and words. She’s an inexperienced audio narrator, but her naïve approach is perfect for the material. In between meditations on life, art, and graduate school, she relates amusing anecdotes about her subjects: listeners may be surprised to learn that Tolstoy was a skilled tennis player or that, during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, Babel may have saved the life of downed American pilot Merian Caldwell Cooper, who went on to direct King Kong in 1933. Batuman’s wit and eye for absurdist detail come alive in this long-awaited audio edition. A Farrar, Straus & Giroux paperback. (Mar.)