A roundup of things consumed by our editors.

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Tobias Carroll
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Also in the vein of Russian literature (or meditations on it), I closed out the week by re-reading Elif Batuman’s The Possessed for WORD’s Classics Book Group, and found it as compelling as I had on the first go-round. Given that Batuman’s been a regular presence in The New Yorker as of late, I’m hoping that another collection of her work isn’t far off.

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http://vol1brooklyn.com/2011/12/10/indexing-elif-batuman-sara-levine-matthew-henriksen-gaslight-anthem-and-much-more/

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JUDITH FLANDERS Historian and author of ‘The Invention of Murder’ (Harper Press)

It is safe to say that the studying-for-a-PhD-in-Russian-literature memoir is a thinly populated genre. But Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Granta) is anarchically funny and, ultimately, a hymn to the pleasure of reading. Maria Edgeworth’s re-issued Patronage (Sort Of Books), written in the same year as Mansfield Park, has a roller-coaster plot that made it the perfect summer-holiday read. And this Christmas I plan to hole up with CJ Sansom’s backlist. I’ve just finished Dissolution (Pan) and the remainder make a reassuringly high pile.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/christmas/8915166/Sunday-Telegraph-Books-of-the-Year-Part-One.html

James Boyle, former head of Radio 4

Alice Oswald’s book of poetry, Memorial (Faber, £12.99), was the most imaginative book of the year. It tells relentlessly and movingly the names and deaths of the hoplites and Trojan foot soldiers of The Iliad: surely a new standard text for Remembrance Sunday. The Possessed by Elif Batuman (Granta, £16.99) was the quirkiest book of the year – starting with the illustration of Tolstoy playing tennis on the cover. A post-graduate student of Russian literature turns her academic pursuit into very amusing travel writing. Alasdair Gray failed to win the James Tait Black biography prize this year but he produced the most beautiful book of 2011 with A Life In Pictures (Canongate, £35). The first 20 pages are ravishing and fully repay the cover price.

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http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/book-features/-1.1136763

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Roddy Doyle
We live in a time of deep recession but, here in Dublin, things still start at “brilliant” and work their way up. The Outlaw Album (Sceptre) is a collection of stories by one of the world’s great novelists, Daniel Woodrell, and it’s brilliant. I’m fond of big dark Russian books, so I loved Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Granta). It’s exhilarating, funny and … brilliant. Jennifer Egan’s novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad (Corsair), is so good, so original, so surprising and wonderful – it’s just absolutely fuckin’ brilliant.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/25/books-of-the-year

http://www.edinburghbookreview.co.uk/reviews/the-possessed-by-elif-batuman