Bloody Hell.

It’s the largest city in Siberia, the 3rd largest in Russia, with a population of about 1.5 million.

And you couldn’t find it on a map.

Shame.

Fact is … you and I know less about Siberia than any other land mass that size in the world.

Siberia … makes up about 77% of Russia’s territory (13.1 million square kilometres), but is home to only 28% (40 million people) of Russia’s population.

… Almost all the population lives in the south, along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The climate in this southernmost part is Humid continental climate (Köppen Dfb) with cold winters but fairly warm summers lasting at least four months. …

I read Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier, a writer for The New Yorker.

… What he loves is its tragedy and its humor, its stoic practicality and its near-insanity: he calls it “the greatest horrible country in the world,” and Siberia is its swampy, often-frozen, and strikingly empty backyard.

He took five trips there over the next dozen or so years, and Travels in Siberia is based on those journeys. But as in Great Plains, when Frazier travels he follows his own curiosity through time as well as space, telling stories of the Mongols and the Decembrists with the same amused and empathetic eye he brings to his own traveling companions. His curiosity quickly becomes yours, as does his affection for this immense and grudgingly hospitable land. …

comment on Amazon

I don’t think I’ll ever get to see the giant bust of Lenin.

Joshua Kim:

“This is one book that is best as an audiobook, as Ian Frazier is more a storyteller than an author, and his reading of his own book greatly adds to its pleasures. ”