Morning reading: Quote/Exceprt/Novel - Elif Batuman's Either/Or

Adam shares a quote from an excerpt of the new Elif Batuman novel.

I have mentioned Elif Batuman often on the podcast and in this blog. You should read her essays about Russian Literature and stoicism and relative impersonators and her college novel The Idiot. I am trying to resist the excerpt of her new novel, Either/Or, because I don’t know how excerpts fit into Batuman’s short story v. novel definition that I obsess over.

One of the ways fiction and poetry writers succeed is by reproducing our ordinary life from a slightly askew perspective. That’s what Batuman does in the passage below, from the Either/Or excerpt which I couldn’t entirely resist.

Svetlana and I were reading the course catalogue. It was like the book of all human possibilities. I thought there was something wrong with the way it was organized. Why were the different branches of literature categorized by geography and language, while sciences were categorized by the level of abstraction, or by the size of the object of study? Why wasn't literature classified by length? Why wasn't science classified by country? Why did religion have its own program, instead of falling under philosophy or anthropology? What made something a religion and not a philosophy? Why was the history of nonindustrial people anthropology and not history?