I love long Russian novels. For years, Anna Karenina was my favorite book. Organized around two interlocking love stories—one adulterous and one marital—it includes ice skating on a frozen Moscow pond, a scene told from a dog’s point of view, and a whisper about nineteenth-century birth control. Who could resist?

I’m guessing some of you are intending to eventually get around to Anna Karenina—or maybe Crime and Punishment, or even War and Peace—but that you could use a little help, support, and community to take the plunge.

Introducing In Case You Missed It:
Revisiting the Classics, the Russian edition

That’s why, this fall, Celia Bookshop is introducing In Case You Missed It: Revisiting the Classics, the Russian edition.

Over the course of about a month, Sibelan Forrester, head of the Russian section of the Modern Language and Literature Department at Swarthmore College, will offer an informal class on a Russian novel. It’s going to be great.

First, though, we need to make a decision.

Which Russian classic?

Which one do you want? Anna Karenina, which I teased above?

Or maybe War and Peace, also by Leo Tolstoy, a story of family life, battlefields, the Masons, romantic love, and estate management set during the Napoleonic wars? If you prefer something closer to a police procedural, maybe you’d like to read Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, about an impoverished student who commits a misguided murder? Or The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s final novel, in which religious and philosophical questions swirl around a patricide?

Or maybe you’d rather jump into a more modern classic like Boris Pasternak’s mid-twentieth-century saga of adulterous love, snow, and the Russian Revolution, Dr. Zhivago, which won the 1958 Nobel Prize (and was made into a breathtaking David Lean movie starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie).

Cast your vote! What should we read (and when)?

Take our poll here, and let us know. The poll also asks about what times of day work best for you and other logistical questions.

In Case You Missed It will be just one of many programs for adults and children that we plan to offer at Celia Bookshop. In addition to author events, we are considering story time for little ones, writing and art-making workshops for middle schoolers, a noir book club, book-and-wine pairings, and silent reading nights. As always, we’d love to hear what you’re excited about. Email us at info@celiabookshop.com and let us know.

In the meantime, imagine yourself on a long, long (long) train journey across a snowy steppe, or crammed in a tiny student apartment in St. Petersburg, or performing the mazurka in a flower-filled ballroom in a great house in Moscow, and get ready to join Sibelan at Celia Bookshop in the fall.

Recommendations

A Dog in Georgia
By Lauren Grodstein

The woman—long gray coat, enormous scarf—scuttled toward Amy just as she and Roxy were leaving the dog run in Tompkins Square Park. It was another blue morning in an unseasonably blue February.

“Hey!” the woman called.

The Georgia in the title of this novel is the country, not the state, which means that author Lauren Grodstein is engaged in a bit of calculated misdirection. Ditto with the opening pages, which seem to locate the

story firmly in lower Manhattan when, within a couple of chapters, we’ll be on a plane bound for Tbilisi.

Amy is a small town girl turned big city chef. She’s also a food writer, wife to a charismatic tattooed philanderer, stepmother to a preternaturally mature teenage son, and—most importantly for the plot—an animal lover who’s really, really good at finding lost dogs.

The possibility of finding a lost dog in Georgia interrupts Amy’s life the way the woman in the long gray coat interrupts her attempt to leave the dog run—the way the description of the woman’s outerwear interrupts the opening sentence: “The woman—long gray coat, enormous scarf—scuttled toward Amy.”

The second sentence—“another blue morning in an unseasonably blue February”—suggests both the tedious routine of Amy’s life and the unsettledness of the world in which she’s living (global warming). These are hints that Amy is ready for a disruptive, potentially transformative adventure. With a dog.

Whether or not you’re inclined to take such small writerly decisions quite so literally, rest assured that Amy is ready for an adventure. That the adventure on which she finds herself will turn out to be heavier than just finding a lost dog maybe shouldn’t come as a surprise. It's just one more misdirection (or plot twist!) doing its work. Because the Tbilisi into which Amy blunders is in the midst of political turmoil not so different from our own.

(Note: Lauren Grodstein teaches at the MFA program at Rutgers-Camden and lives in South Jersey—so she’s basically local!)

Dwelling
By Emily Hunt Kivel

For a long time Evie had lived in the city, and when the day came that everybody was evicted from their homes—pots and pans and shoes and postcards piled high on the sidewalk, clothing bunched into trash bags, wardrobes and candelabras waiting under the summer rain—she assumed she’d find an alternative.

Why not? she thought, her forehead damp with sweat as she hiked the aluminum stairs to her office. The elevators, as if in the spirit of municipal implosion, were not operational. I’m smart, she thought. I have skills. Or, sort of. Maybe. The willingness, at least, to learn them.

Emily Hunt Kivel’s weird and delightful first novel does not quite belong to the post-apocalyptic genre that’s been exploding in recent years, but it’s sort of in the general vicinity. “Women-at-the-end-of-the-world literature,” my friend Douglas calls it. In the novel, things in New York City have gotten so bad that the mayor decides to evict all the renters. Given the verging-on-unbelievable housing crisis there in the real world, this sort of almost feels within the realm of possibility.

The novel is also located in the vicinity of fairy tales, which we can hear in its very first words: “For a long time” is surely neighbor to “Once upon a time.” Later in the book, a few magical things will happen. The housing thread and the fairy tale thread will come together in (to take once example) a giant shoe that becomes Evie’s home.

This smart, surprising, funny book made me think more deeply and expansively about what makes a family and a home.

Here One Moment
By Liane Moriarty

Later, not a single person will recall seeing the lady board the flight at Hobart Airport.

Nothing about her appearance or demeanor raises a red flag or even an eyebrow.

She is not drunk or belligerent or famous.

She is not injured, like the bespectacled hipster with his arm scaffolded in white gauze so one hand is permanently pressed to his heart, as if he’s professing love or honesty.

She’s not frail like the stooped elderly couple wearing multiple heavy layers as if they’re off to join Captain Scott's Antarctic expedition.

The opening litany of things the lady on this flight is not goes on for many pages: not frazzled like this passenger, not chatty like that one, not extremely pregnant like the other one over there. Retrospectively, we understand that Moriarty is using all these nots to introduce her large cast of characters, all these people on the plane with their different situations who she wants us to remember.

And of course, she particularly wants us to remember the “unmemorable” lady, who later in the book will come to be known as “the Death Lady.” It’s clever! Moriarty, known for books like Nine Perfect Strangers and Big Little Lies, is a clever writer.

Here One Moment (the mega-bestselling novel came out in paperback this summer) is a thought-experiment book. What if you knew (or thought you knew) the moment of your death? Would that change the way you live your life? It’s almost a gimmick, yet, in Moriarty’s professional hands, the premise turns into a heartfelt exploration of how awareness of the reality of death can shape lives for the better.

The sentences that open Here One Moment are clear and straightforward: “Later, not a single person will recall seeing the lady board the flight at Hobart Airport.” Moriarty is not a fancy writer, but she knows how to make the reader wonder and turn pages. We want to know who this overlookable lady is and what happened on that flight to Hobart.

Books don’t often make me cry, but this one did. Odds—which are one of the subjects of this deeply enjoyable novel—are that it will make you tear up too.

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Which Russian Classic?

Introducing In Case You Missed It:
Revisiting the Classics, the Russian edition