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andjhostet 's review for:
Not sure how I felt about this one honestly. I'll say one thing, this is a terrible book to listen on audiobook. The book is about reading Russian short stories and analyzing them, picking them apart and figuring out what makes them great. This process, requires referencing the original text a lot, which does not work at all when you are listening to an audiobook. If I ever try this book again, I would definitely read the physical book, probably with a pen in hand to annotate.
All that being said, the stories that were covered were good, by Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. Of these, I've only ever read Chekhov (who I loved), so this book was a great introduction to great Russian writers, with easily digestible stories.
The analysis of the stories were pretty hit or miss for me. At times, Saunders made me feel like I don't even deserve to be reading the same books as he, with some of the insightful things he was gleaning from the text that I was missing entirely, it made me feel inadequate as a reader. Other times though, I thought some of the things he was talking about was utter hogwash, and reading wayyyy too far into the analysis and finding things that weren't there at all.
All that being said, the stories that were covered were good, by Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. Of these, I've only ever read Chekhov (who I loved), so this book was a great introduction to great Russian writers, with easily digestible stories.
The analysis of the stories were pretty hit or miss for me. At times, Saunders made me feel like I don't even deserve to be reading the same books as he, with some of the insightful things he was gleaning from the text that I was missing entirely, it made me feel inadequate as a reader. Other times though, I thought some of the things he was talking about was utter hogwash, and reading wayyyy too far into the analysis and finding things that weren't there at all.