Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very happy to have as my guest, Elif Batuman, the author of The Possessed Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.

It's published by Farras Strauss and Giroux in a paperback original edition.

LF, both a reader and student of Russian literature, has written an astonishing, hilarious,

and moving book about her life as a student

of literature at Stanford University and about her travels to Russia. She tells about her visit

to Tolstoy's house, her meeting with the relatives of Isaac Babel, and debates about the

facts of Tolstoy's death. The book is very cleverly produced. And they had the presence

of mind to put a cartoon by Raz Schwast on the cover to let people know that you're not buying

exactly a work of literary criticism or exactly a memoir. It's this great mix of how a person can fall in love

with literature and with the world at the same time. Tell me, when you first saw this cover,

what did you think? I loved it. I was so thrilled that they did it. The cover shows little windows with some readers of Russian books looking rather anxious. And one of them is confronting a dancing book with a face on it. And I remember when I saw it, I thought that book looked too happy and not scary enough, and I asked if it could

look a little bit more threatening. And it looks so threatening. It's fantastic, and still,

and still cheerful. For all of its merriment, Elf is not unfamiliar with the term resignation

of the soul. And so it's not as if we're watching a book,

this its subject, as sometimes happens.

This is a profound understanding

...