The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Embarking on her freshman year at Harvard in the early tech days of the 1990s, a young artist and daughter of Turkish immigrants begins a correspondence with an older mathematics student from Hungary while struggling with her changing sense of self, first love and a daunting career prospect.

Good plane reading. While locations and details are obviously different, this book about a freshman at Harvard brought back all the feels of the academic lifestyle.

i loved this but i also cant imagine literally anyone else enjoying this

to say the humor is dry feels like a gross understatement, but it definitely plays into the idea that selin is a naive college freshman and these awkward situations and their consequently dry humor were incredibly amusing to me

i think this is just your average coming of age story, except pretentious (think sally rooney but less weird occurrences). it follows a very typical american 4 year college experience where in your freshman year youre meeting a gazillion new people, getting exposed to a lot of ideas and thoughts that make you pretentious, and falling for the first person to give you a smidgen of attention (like, obsessively falling for)

then the trip through europe was fun, especially for an inexperienced american. the language is nice because it generally lacks any judgment, as though you as the reader are meant to draw your own conclusions.

i absolutely do not recommend this book however unless all of the above appeals to you, and you don't mind 400 pages of it

I wanted to like this book, but I just didn't. It was so hyped up for me – Pulitzer prize finalist, raving reviews in publications I respect, and a pretty solid back-cover description. But hard as I tried, I just couldn't get into it.

Synopsis: a young girl from New Jersey of Turkish heritage arrives at Harvard in the early 90s. She focuses her first year of classes on Russian and linguistics. She meets an older student, the brooding intellectual type, in one of her classes, and quickly becomes entranced by him. They develop a stilted and undefined relationship that meanders through the rest of the novel in a very unsatisfying manner, through the end of the school year to a summer abroad in Paris and weirdly, rural Hungary.

Roxane Gay wrote that it's both easy to read and hard to read, and I agree with that. On the surface, the words themselves are accessible. The dialogue is quite simple. Nothing in the plot is overtly complex. But there are deep intellectual layers that make you think hard (too hard?) about language: its power, its limits, and its capacity for infinite strangeness. Reading this book felt like being in a foreign country where everyone speaks English as their second language; it's easy to understand what everyone is saying, but at the same time, so much feels obscured, absurd, and lost in translation.

I think one could extract a lot of interesting concepts and discussions from this novel, and it did make me think, but I won't be revisiting this book, or this author, anytime soon. Overall, a disappointment.