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Mostly the Russians this season — the long, snowbound ones you finish and then miss. What I underlined, and why.
Raskolnikov commits his crime in the first fifty pages. The rest is the slow, sweltering business of a mind that cannot live with what the body has done.
Books · 6 min
Everyone remembers the first line. Fewer remember that the novel's real love story is Levin's — mowing a field, falling in love, learning, slowly, how to live.
Books · 7 min
A talking black cat, a decapitation by tram, and a manuscript that refuses to burn. Bulgakov's banned masterpiece is the funniest book about tyranny ever written.
Books · 6 min
Professor Pnin boards the wrong train in the first sentence and is misunderstood for the rest of the novel. Nabokov lets us laugh, then makes us ashamed of it.
Books · 4 min
Chichikov travels the provinces buying up dead serfs who still count, on paper, as property. Gogol turns a tax scam into a portrait of an entire drowsy empire.
Books · 5 min