During the siege, they ate their books.

I have a confession to make: sometimes I can’t meet my reading target of one book a week. There are weeks when I carry a book around with every intention of reading it, and dutifully open it while I’m having coffee, but don’t get to finish it for one reason or another. The operative word is “dutifully” — if reading feels like a duty, my brain will not cooperate. It’s not the author’s fault or even mind: you just have to be in the mood for certain books. So no hard feelings, Leo Tolstoy, and thanks for the exercise. Lugging War and Peace helped to tone my arm muscles.

There are some weeks when I can read three books without trying, and they make up for the weeks of zero.

For years I’ve been fascinated with Russia: the Tsarist Russia of Chekov, Dostoevsky, and Babel, and the post-Soviet Russia of tennis players, gangsters in Armani, and oligarchs who snap up British football teams without a thought. I like Bulgakov, but I’ll pass on Soviet-era literature because there’s only so much grim grayness I can take. (Wait, some perceptive reader asks, What about Nabokov? He strikes me as French rather than Russian.)

There are a number of excellent recent non-fiction books on the Stalin era: I recommend In The Court of The Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore and its prequel, Young Stalin. In these biographies the grim grayness is marinated in blood; critics have rightfully compared them to The Godfather I and II. Young Stalin probably sold out its first run on the basis of its cover: a photo of Joseph Stalin in his 20s. He looks um...how shall I put this...handsome. This man killed more people than Hitler, and he had...charm. But that’s how monsters work.

Curious about life in contemporary Russia, I went looking for new Russian authors at my neighborhood bookstores. A few Russian names leapt up from the shelves: Gary Shteyngart, Lara Vapnyar, Andrei Makine, Anya Ulinich, but their novels are set in the West. Apparently immigrant fiction is all the rage among American and British publishers. The American critic Louis Menand offers this prototype of contemporary world literature: “a trauma-and-recovery story, with magical realist elements, involving abuse and family dysfunction, that arrives at resolution by the invocation of spiritual or holistic verities.” That sounds about right, particularly in immigrant novels where the protagonist and his wacky family, oppressed and persecuted in their homeland, move to the West, where they have absurd but delightful misadventures before coming to terms with their dual citizenships. That’s not what I was looking for. I wanted to read something by a Russian in 21st century Russian, which disqualified Olga Grushinko’s The Dream Life of Sukhanov, set in 1985, and Boris Akunin’s bestselling series of detective novels which take place in the 19th century. Sergei Lukyanenko has his trilogy of vampire novels which have been adapted for film — Night Watch, Day Watch, and Twilight Watch — but I was more interested in humans with regular incisors and bicuspids.

I ended up with three books: Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov, City of Thieves by David Benioff, and The Calligrapher by Edward Docx. Benioff is an American novelist and screenwriter (25th Hour — great, Troy — sucky), and his book is set in Leningrad in 1941, but the introduction won me over. Docx is British, but his mother was part-Russian, and the novel is set in modern-day Petersburg.

Death and the Penguin is the story of Viktor, a struggling writer whose only friend is Misha the penguin. He adopted Misha when the zoo, being unable to feed its penguins, gave them away. Writer and penguin lead a quiet life in Kiev, where Viktor earns barely enough to buy Misha frozen fish. Viktor gets a break when a newspaper hires him to write the obituaries of prominent personalities. His subjects are still alive at the time of the writing, but they develop a disconcerting habit of dying shortly after he submits their obits. Viktor soon discovers that these are not coincidences, and before long he’s being hunted by the Russian Mafia. What’s a lone writer to do?

Kurkov has a deadpan, matter-of-fact style that never strains for effects. The kinship between man and penguin is portrayed in such an unsentimental manner that it becomes quite moving. Violence when it transpires is dealt with quickly, without gory passages and macho posturing. You get the impression that violence is imminent, so you’re constantly on edge. Novels with animal characters usually can’t resist emotional blackmail — you find yourself crying, Please don’t hurt the animal! — but Kurkov respects his characters too much to wring cheap tears out of their plight. Death and the Penguin is a funny, oddly touching novel that makes the surreal seem normal.

City of Thieves is set in the siege of Leningrad, when the Nazis tried to break the Russians by starving and bombing them. It didn’t work: it was Hitler’s army that broke in Russia, as Napoleon’s had. Benioff starts by introducing this grandparents: two Russian emigres comfortably retired in Florida. He implies that this is their story, with embellishments.

A lone German paratrooper falls out of the sky, dead, and teenagers loot the body. One of them is 16-year-old Lev Beniov, who is arrested and taken to prison, where he expects to be shot any moment. Instead he gets tossed into a cell with Kolya, a deserter from the army. In the morning the two are set free on the condition that they find a dozen fresh eggs for the colonel’s daughter’s wedding cake. Whereupon the novel reveals itself to be a buddy movie in which the awkward teen has tragicomic adventures with the soldier, who happens to be tall, handsome, brave, funny, fearless, and literary. Benioff’s book is screaming to be made into a movie; I would cast Shia LaBeouf and Marat Safin (if he puts down his racquet).

I enjoyed City of Thieves very much and literally couldn’t put it down, but I am suspicious of books from the Sally Field Oscar Acceptance Speech school of writing: You like me! You really, really like me! It’s set in one of the most horrific periods of the 20th century, but even when Benioff is describing the deadly cold, the constant hunger (Food was so scarce that they took to boiling the glue in books for the protein), the killing and the atrocities, it still seems pretty. And this is a book that features cannibals and dogs turned into mines. If you love your pets, skip that part — the author milks every tear out of the reader.

I started reading Pravda yesterday and I’m not sure I can finish it, but I’ve found an alternate use for it. You open the book to any page, pick a sentence at random, and if it is overwritten, you take a shot of vodka. Let’s try it. “The naked body of this other human being entranced him, engrossed him, bewitched him like a river god rising in vapors of jasmine and myrrh with a different violin sonata for each of his senses.” You will be drunk in three pages.

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