Elif Batuman Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Elif Batuman

I fell in love with “Anna Karenina” because of how clearly it showed that no character was wrong—that even the unreasonable-seeming people were doing what appeared right to them, based on their own knowledge and experiences.

Elif Batuman

I read that book in 2016 and it really did change my life! I was able to let go of a lot of shame and self-hatred that turned out to be tied up in my accumulated belongings. (This meant learning to discard things without hating myself for being wasteful or ungrateful.)

Elif Batuman

I do think Proust gets better after 30. In college, I could barely get through “Swann’s Way,” or really any “literary” book about childhood... Now, after years of therapy, I can reread “Swann’s Way” and see specifically what the younger me couldn’t face about childhood.

Elif Batuman

When I was younger, I struggled a lot with anger... I would experience panic and despair, because it all felt so inescapable. For some reason, those feelings melted away when I was reading Haruki Murakami. I must have read “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” at least 10 times.

Elif Batuman

“Hadji Murat,” which was published posthumously, is considered unique in Tolstoy’s work, and in the nineteenth-century Russian canon, for how thoroughly it enters the perspective of the imperial subject.

Elif Batuman

Batuman on seeing herself in the protagonist. "I was a seeker...I was really just looking for literature to show me the answers, how to live, and how to create a successful life. And that's also the case for Selin in these books."

Elif Batuman

Widely revered as the founder of Russian literature, he serially published “Eugene Onegin,” often considered the first great Russian novel, starting in the eighteen-twenties, at a time when much of Russian aristocratic life was conducted in French.

Elif Batuman

When asked about the last great book she read, Elif Batuman chose Adrienne Rich's "Blood, Bread, and Poetry" - specifically, the essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence."

Elif Batuman

In Tbilisi, the Gogol story I kept coming back to was “The Nose”: the one where Major Kovalyov, a mid-level civil servant, wakes up one morning with no nose... In “The Nose,” as in so much of the Russian literature that I had been revisiting, the interests of empire prevail.