I highly recommend, to anybody and everybody, Ian Frazier’s recent two-part Siberian travelogue in the New Yorker. (Unfortunately it is only available online to subscribers, or for a fee, but if you want to read it let me know and you can borrow my copies.)

To think I almost didn’t read this piece, because I looked at it and said, “Ugh. Two parts? Travelogue? Siberia?”

But the ways that Frazier overcomes the average reader’s natural aversion to a bajillion-word description of a trip across a landmass whose name has become synonymous with boredom and exile are a testament to the power of first-person journalism, and cement his status as one of our greatest living nonfiction writers, the obvious heir to John McPhee’s topical and stylistic universe, and the best bridge imaginable between that generation of memorist/journalists and mine.

He tackles the geography. The history. The literature. The vodka. The mosquitoes. And best of all, the people, especially his two guides, who both live up to and thwart a slew of hilarious post-Soviet stereotypes.

It’s a beautiful, epic, and ultimately very personal piece. It feels immediate, even though the events it describes happened in 2001. It did what the best New Yorker pieces do, which is to cause you to be fascinated by topics in which you’d never thought you’d ever be even remotely interested. I wanted that little black diamond to never appear. It made me want to do what I always want to do with good writing, especially good writing about Russia: recommend it to my dad.