Summer reading

I have to warn you that the photo accompanying the internet version of this article is really unnecessary. The article, however, is a great read. I'll just excerpt the part about Russia:

In Russia, reading is a favorite national pastime even in the age of biznesmeni, and headings on Web sites like Moi Lyubimi Knizhki (My Beloved Little Books) reflect the earnest Russian passion for letters. Despite the switch to the market economy in the 1990s, which brought pulp fiction to the masses, high-quality literature lives on. Muscovites and St. Petersburgers can be seen on the subways reading classic fiction year-round -- Twain and Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Gogol -- so caught up in their pages that they miss their stops.

And for every Russian you spot reading a cheap edition of Odin Raz Ne Dostatochno (Once Is Not Enough, by Jacqueline Susann), you might see another reading the poems of Anna Akhmatova or the cynical but emotionally charged novels of Sergei Minaev, New Russia's Jay McInerney. In Dukhless (meaning soulless), he presented a coke-dusted portrait of greedy, lustful, aspirational Moscow-in-the-'90s, while in his new novel, R.A.B. (which means slave), he indicts corporate dystopia. Although Meyer's quartet is popular in Russia, too, her books are among the top 50 bestsellers, not the top 10. Minaev's R.A.B. beat the vampires to the dachas, as did Lyudi v Golom (People in the Nude), by Andrei Astvatsaturov, a wry, brainy novel about present-day St. Petersburg intellectuals (Russian critics compare the author to Henry Miller and Woody Allen, his characters to Mikhail Lermontov's cad Pechorin), and The Falcon and the Swallow, the newest installment in a historical-fiction series by Boris Akunin about a detective named Erast Fandorin. (Boris Akunin is a pen name, coined in honor of the revolutionary philosopher Mikhail Bakunin.)

Russians use the word kulturny -- cultured -- more freely and less self-consciously than people in any other country, and they love books that remind them of their country's august imperial and cultural heritage, particularly at the present moment, when national pride is high and when recently attained economic prestige is under threat. One nonfiction book in the Russian top 10, however, points to present practical concerns: Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, in translation. Not content to take refuge in the fantasy of past triumphs, Russians bent on future greatness are reading Outliers to ferret out the secrets to success that Gladwell has unearthed and see if any might work for them.

Spot on, apart from the translation of the website. It's "My Favorite Books," not "My Beloved Little Books," which is just silly. She probably plugged the words into an internet translator, but it wouldn't have been a bad idea to have gotten a Russian speaker to check it. I could go on about how I can see why that translation emerged, but I somehow doubt that you care. I would like to read "Lyudi v Golom," as well as a couple of the French books she mentions later in the review.