How’s this for a change of pace? A Russian aristocrat is sentenced to a life of confinement in a hotel overlooking the Kremlin during the years of revolution. He endeavors to live a life of purpose and meaning, circumstances be damned. This turned out to be uncannily relevant to today’s age of quarantines, and to my ongoing existential crisis. The novel is a celebration of noticing, capturing the magnified importance of observation when one’s physical space is limited— Towles manages to describe everything from a clock ticking by, second after second to a finely-crafted pair of scissors, in painstaking yet essential detail.
