Take and read

I just finished what is sure to be my favorite book of the year - Amor Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow. So, so, so good! It was a delight to read from beginning to end.  Maybe I did wonder at the beginning, "Where is this going to go?" but only because I have avoided reading many reviews. I keep seeing it highly recommended (along Towles' other book Rules of Civility, which I am going to head to the library to checkout first thing tomorrow, even though I have three other library books and three books of ecocriticism essays I am intending to read for class...) but I never paid much attention to the reviews out of a shortage of time for reading about books I don't have time to read. But just before we left on our Christmas travels, I stopped in at the library for some fun books to read, and this one happened to be sitting out on the library's "to be reshelved" cart, so I picked it up. I neglected to take it with me because I needed to finish a book I had borrowed (River of Gold, by a local author, Victor Villasenor - a fine book full of interesting historical details about the lives of Mexican immigrants in the 1920s) and then I read Maryanne Wolfe's Come Home, Reader, which is also really good because of its subject matter and the way Wolfe combines details from studies by neuroscientists, education specialists, literary critics, and technology gurus into a very readable cautionary tale about what is lost when reading digitally. It's a book I want to write about more because the subject matter is so pertinent.

But right now, I urge you to do yourself a favor and escape to the world of the Metropol Hotel in Moscow where Count Alexander Rostov has been exiled to the end of his days beginning in 1922.  Towles creates a vivid and delightful world by combining interesting details about Russian politics and history with engaging character studies and insights into human nature and what gives life meaning. It's a world the reader doesn't want to leave.  I was willingly drawn into a self-imposed exile into the life of the Metropol with Count Rostov and his friends - and an enemy or two.  Towles creates the very enchantment with an imaginary world that Maryanne Wolfe writes is so necessary to our identity as people who read, people who need escape as well as enrichment and engagement and delight. 

The cynic in me is a little hesitant still to read any reviews.  Perhaps some critic has accused Towles of creating a main character who is a little too much of the perfect gentleman. Are his observations and insights ones that have been made better by other writers? Does it matter? I was happily absorbed by getting to know the characters and listening in on their witty dialogue, the philosophizing, and the observations of character and history.  And so wholeheartedly I recommend setting aside a few hours of respite from regular life to retreat to the Metropol and enter into life in Moscow in the first half of the twentieth century.