It’s a nice feeling to finally read a book that has long been on one’s TBR list. I recently finished Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, a novel I’ve been meaning to read since 2017, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. So much so that I can’t remember when I last found a book so funny and engrossing. It had me looking up the Ottoman rule over Hungary, Dostoyevsky, Russian verb tenses, the geography of the Balkans, and the 1990s early internet protocol “fingering” (not as dirty as it sounds).

It’s hard to describe this book. On its face, The Idiot is about a booksmart college student who is actually quite dumb about herself and the world. The plot, loosely, is about a young woman, Selin, during her freshman year at Harvard. Selin is obsessed with language and meaning, and much of the narration are her random, “serious” thoughts as she tries to process her college classes.

Oh, and she has an obsessive crush on a Hungarian classmate named Ivan, who is older, has a girlfriend, and is leaving for graduate school in California. Ivan, of course, kind of sucks, but they develop a deep relationship over email. This book is set in the mid-1990s when email was relatively new (hence the “fingering” references, important for an obsessive crush). The ways Selin fixates on Ivan – overanalyzing every interaction, trying to sound sophisticated and smart in her emails, checking and rechecking the messages, signing up to teach English in Hungary over the summer at his suggestion — felt agonizingly familiar to my obsessive crushes as a teenager and young adult. (Except for the teaching-English-in-Hungary part – I never had it that bad.)

Sometimes, it was a little painful to see my own youthful folly in Selin’s mistakes, but I also found it charming and, quite frankly, hilarious. The Idiot perfectly captures the early days of the college experience, when one is bombarded with new ideas and new people. I will never have a time like that again, and this book had me thinking about my own college years. I haven’t that much about my freshman year in ages. I just found Selin so funny (often unintentionally) and immensely likable. This book probably is not for everybody, but it was definitely for me. Boy, did I love The Idiot.