A Gentleman in Moscow + 2024 Fall/Winter Books

Tom Hanks in the Terminal but make it Russian🎩🇷🇺

Привет друзья! That is, hello friends! And happy September! Always a favorite month of mine for its back-to-school feels and surprising late summer temperatures—a combination of warm days and cool nights. I’ve had a really wonderful summer and I hope you have too. Things slowed down significantly: the oppressive heat gave way to little motivation on my end, which bled into my reading routine. There were days I didn’t want to read at all. That has not deterred me from spending a significant amount of money on more books! Hard not to when you live near a second-hand bookstore and come across local booksellers with tables setup in the park where we walk the dog—har har ;) Hopefully as we edge towards the fall, I’ll watch a little less television and spend a little more time with the books. My husband has started to confiscate my phone so I can focus…not sure the confiscation has been strictly enforced enough, though.

We were due for a more historical fiction book and I was between Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow (he’ll likely appear in future book selections) and A Gentleman in Moscow and considering we were already in the dual cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma in Eastern Europe, I thought we may as well just head north to neighboring Russia instead of returning to the Bronx. I wish I had a more thrilling author write up to follow but our next book was penned by a rather average individual — and I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that as they can’t all be weird kooks like our goddess Katherine Dunn.

Amor Towles was born in Boston in 1964 in what he claims was an upper-middle class family but you and I would likely define it as plain upper class: his father was an investment banker and the young Towles attended private schools in his youth. In an interview with TIME, Amor said, “My great-grandparents would have been very comfortable in Edith Wharton’s novels,” a nod to the aristocrats of New York society during the Gilded Age.

Regardless of socio-economic status, Towles fell in love with reading at an early age. He says “…we didn’t dine out or travel that much. But my father was always willing to buy us a book. The summer I discovered the Hardy Boys mysteries, I would spend the day reading one of them from beginning to end, then make my father take me to the bookstore so that he could buy me the next volume.” Now that is parenting I could get behind.

Towles graduated from Yale with a BA and sought a Masters in English at Stanford University. While at Yale, he connected with the co-founder of The Paris Review, Peter Matthiessen who saw great potential in the young writer. In 1989, his thesis short story, “The Temptations of Pleasure” was published in The Paris Review and Matthiessen agreed to “cultivate” Towles’s talent. However, when his plans to do a teaching fellowship in China failed (derailed by the Tiananmen Square massacre), and in an effort to please his father, Towles instead moved to New York City to pursue a career as an investment manager at a boutique Wall Street firm. The writing was put on hold for years. According to Towles, Matthiessen was furious, and remembers him saying, “The people I’ve seen go to Wall Street do not come back. So you should assume that at this moment, you have turned your back on writing for the rest of your life.”

Amor Towles; image by Isabel Magowan for TIME

This would not be the case. After a decade making his first fortune as partner at the firm, Towles got to work on Rules of Civility, his debut 2011 novel. The book took one year to write, and was published to great acclaim (I read it and remember enjoying it!). From the money he made off sales, he retired from the firm in 2013 to pursue writing full time.

A Gentleman in Moscow was his follow-up to Civility. The inspiration for the book came to Towles in 2009. On an annual business trip to Switzerland, he recognized hotel guests from the previous year. The idea of being trapped in a grand hotel was intriguing to him and he began writing the story of Count Alexander Rostov.

It’s 1922. A Bolshevik tribunal has forced Count Rostov into confinement at the grand Metropol Hotel, which sits across from the Kremlin. The Count must watch some of the most turbulent decades of Russian history unfold outside his window over the course of two plus decades. His “incarceration” leads Rostov to dive into bigger emotional discoveries and brings forth the question of “what it means to be a man of purpose” and how to make the most of one’s life despite its limitations. Critics have hailed Towles’s finesse for lush scenes and witty humor, which likely helped keep the book on the New York Times bestseller list for 59 consecutive weeks. The book is now a limited series starring Ewan McGregor on Paramount+ so there’s something to look forward to, too! I hope we all enjoy the journey with this Count (although, I can’t imagine it being nearly as incredible as our original Count, Monte Cristo).

This is also the time to divulge the books for the remainder of the year in case you wanted to provide a list for Santa a few months early! I spend hours and hours researching and toiling over my decisions, changing my mind last minute then reverting to my original picks. My goal each month is to provide a totally new story that will intrigue a majority of the group, and if not intrigue, then at least make aware of their existence. I appreciate you all sticking with me if you’ve come this far!

📚October 2024: Has anybody seen the film, American Fiction? The Oscar-winner was adapted from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel, Erasure by Cord Jefferson. He gave a moving acceptance speech that hit hard for film industry workers. That satire follows a frustrated writer-professor who writes a stereotypical “Black book” only for it to be mistaken for serious literature. The movie was a hoot, as I’m sure the book is too. Everett’s latest is James, a re-imagined telling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told by Finn’s companion, an escaped slave named Jim. Our last satire, Catch-22, was a bomb for me so I’m hoping James will yield better results :)

📚 November 2024: Hyperion is considered a science fiction but it is also a space opera, our first in book club! The Hugo Award-winning 1989 novel is told through multiple time lines and various points of views. Often compared to the Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the book follows seven pilgrims who set forth on a voyage to the planet Hyperion where a killing machine known as the Shrike may grant them a wish…and annihilate the rest. Luckily, Hyperion is not written in Middle English! According to the Reddit boards, Bradley Cooper has the rights to adapt this baby into a film but whether that ever gets made, films hardly ever do the novels justice. We’ll have to rely on our imaginations for now.🪐

📚 December-January 2024: I’m breaking the very first promises/goal I made when I started this book club—and I have my first Substack post to prove it. But after much convincing from my husband’s end, and the rest of the literati’s praise for this book, we will embark on the philosophical screwball comedy journey that is Infinite Jest. In 2014, it was the HYPE book of the L-train: you couldn’t go into a single subway car during a rush hour commute without seeing some poor sap who tricked themselves into thinking they could balance the book in one hand while holding on for dear life with the other. I admired them but mostly felt sorry for them.

My last attempt to read Infinite Jest was in 2017 and I got as far as page 81. I’m feeling brave this time around though, probably because we conquered the mammoth Count of Monte Cristo last December/January and suddenly, 1,000+ pages don’t seem so scary anymore. But the accountability of this book club will propel me to push past to the finish line. What will we gain at the end of David Foster Wallace’s crowning achievement? Bragging rights, and likely some carpal tunnel. Get two bookmarks ready, or spring for an e-reader (I’ll allow it!).

As always, support your local bookstores and local libraries and until next time, happy reading!