A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Readable, diverting book about reconciling oneself to changed circumstances, and to keeping your chin up in the face of adversity. Unfortunately it is also Russian literature-lite, a kind of Oprah's Book Club version of the real thing: the author apes the style of a real Russian novel, and his characters' comportment and dialogue ape what you'd find in real Russian literature.

Maybe this might lead a few curious readers to actual Russian literature (see the Russian Lit Starter Pack at the end of this post). If so, then it's good that this novel exists.

The story revolves around Alexander Rostov, a Russian aristocrat deemed a "Former Person" by the Bolshevik regime and sentenced, implausibly, to lifetime house arrest in Moscow's famous Metropol Hotel. In the decades to follow Rostov lives out his life in this hotel as a sort of reverse Forrest Gump: all the world's interesting people come to him.

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Rostov is a good example of a Mary Sue character: perfect in nearly every way, always ready with the consummate bon mot, an unerring observer of human nature, and an expert in whatever arbitrary skill the storyline requires: classical music, literature, orology, gourmanderie, oenology, marksmanship--even pilferage (in one particularly far-fetched plot event late in the book).

For a reader to swallow this novel's fundamental premise (that Rostov, rather than being summarily executed, would be put under house arrest in one of the world's finest hotels where he could somehow, for free, still eat in the hotel's restaurants, drink at the bar, wander the halls, seduce actresses, and, eventually, help teach European and American culture to powerful Bolshevik apparatchiks) requires either complete ignorance of Soviet-era history or a gravity-defying suspension of disbelief. Get past that and the story will carry you along harmlessly.

Russian Literature Starter Pack:

Anton Chekhov short stories

Ivan Turgenev: Fathers and Sons; Torrents of Spring

Nikolai Gogol: Dead Souls; see also his short story "The Overcoat"

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov

Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina

The Prophet of Edan by Philip Chase [The Edan Trilogy #2]

We all have our part to play and our duty to perform. This is a beautiful novel about performing your duty with honor, even in the face of almost certain failure. Author Philip Chase has an unusual gift for telling a compelling story, and The Prophet of Edan works on two levels: on the individual level, with characters we care about and root for, and on the grand, civilizational level, where entire nations hurl themselves at each other in a desperate war of survival. And the geopolitical dramas in Philip's world of Eormenlond are downright Kissingerian --with betrayal, realpolitik and honor, all in equal measure. Now, any story with a large cast and a lot of moving parts presents the author with a structural challenge: how do you help the reader keep everybody and everything straight, but yet do it in a way that's organic to the story? After all, this is the second part of a trilogy, and a lot happened in Book I . So I'll share an example here of what this author does,...

The Art of War in the Middle Ages by Charles Oman

A wonderful, information-dense book surveying the evolution of warfare across the Middle Ages, and a glorious starting point for readers to contextualize an enormous amount of European history. There's a great deal of historical knowledge here that author Charles Oman assumes in his readers. And so the very act of reading this book (and looking up the author's near-constant historical references) equates to a semester or two--at least--of upper-level undergrad European history. Read this book and spend some time looking things up. Then read several more books like this [1]. Pretty soon, enough osmosis happens such that the various battles and historical figures this author mentions casually will be things you start mentioning casually: Cannae, Adrianople, Brunanburh, Hastings, Robert Guiscard, Durazzo, Tours, Crecy, Agincourt, Arnold von Winkelried, Albrecht von Wallenstein, and so on. (This will be an inner monologue of course, because we all know how much every...

H.R. by Edwin Lefevre

I wouldn't recommend this odd book for its story. But H.R. is interesting for its social and psychological commentary on early 20th century New York society, as the Gilded Age gave way to the so-called Progressive Era. Edwin Lefevre is the author of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator , the famous (at least among investors) pseudobiography of Jesse Livermore. This book, in stark contrast, is a forgotten and comparatively forgettable work. But not totally forgettable. The reader watches the life arc of a young man who catapults himself across several caste barriers, starting as a frustrated New York City bank clerk who quits and, implausibly, starts a union of sandwich-board advertisers. He then uses this sandwich board advertising platform (you could think of it as an early 1900s "new media" platform) to gain influence throughout the city, ultimately parlaying his way into joining New York's social and economic elite. At its heart, this book is about power and influ...

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