Sort of a random pickup from me while I’ve been trying to expand my book-reading horizons this year. Kalder is a white guy but he is a white guy from Scotland who is living in Moscow and decides to go to the weird ends of the Russian empire, looking at a lot of former Soviet places that are now sort of muddling along as sort-of independent. He talks about the history of the people who used to live there, goes in search of what’s interesting and/or cool and spends a lot of time bored and hungry. On some trips he goes with friends and on some he goes alone. While he’s not the most reliable narrator in all cases, the things he decides to discuss and talk about have a level of universal appeal. Many of these places are now places that I want to go, even though I suspect that just the intervening decade will have changed them tremendously.