A review by mercm
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman

4.0

EB delivers precisely what she promises: the rich material of a literature student's research. Highlights included serial encounters between Great Russian Authors (Chekhov and Tolstoy; Dostoevsky and Turgenev). Her faults are meta: EB's writing slips into the same trite style she brilliantly skewers early on. But she remains unpretentious and engaging.