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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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."

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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.

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