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I didn't understand until now. My eyes fill with tears, and I don't know why. But I know that it's by these things, and nothing else, that we survive. Poetry doesn't exist to make life beautiful. Poetry is life itself.

The Siege is the story of a Russian family trapped in Leningrad in the long siege by Nazi troops that took place between September 8, 1941 and January 27, 1944. The book covers the first year of the siege, including the first relentless winter. I knew, of course, that the Germans had attacked Russia and that German soldiers paid a huge price for that error, but I had no idea that it lasted for over two years and had truly given no thought to what it was like for those being blockaded behind the line.

The story revolves around Anna, a young woman in her early twenties, who is already raising her younger brother because her mother has died giving him life. Her father is a writer, who is out of favor in Stalin’s Russia. An actress, also out-of-favor, a tough red-head who becomes Anna’s friend, and a young doctor named Andrei round out the cast of characters. The details we are given regarding the effects of the winter and the absence of food make the suffering palpable.

It is hard, indeed, to imagine how anyone endures the hardships and keeps their sanity.

Anna doesn't like going past the park anymore. There are people sitting on benches, swathed in snow, planted like bulbs to wait for spring. They stay there day after day. No one comes to take them away.

One of the things history does is inform us. The past can be a warning to the future, for it has that uncanny way of repeating itself if you dare to forget the lesson it has offered you. The moment you say, “this cannot happen to us��, it might.

Pre-Covid, this might have just read like a World War II history, but post-Covid, when I got to the section where Dunmore began to talk about the city, the danger, the complacency of the people, who had always been supplied and believed they could not be completely without, I shivered with a sense that history was talking to me, directly.

Suddenly and sharply, it's obvious that cities only exist because everyone agrees to let them exist. It's crazy, when you think of it, for millions of mouths to pack themselves into a couple of hundred square kilometers, without a pig or a potato patch between them.

I fear cities are even less self-sufficient these days.

For city people it is hard to grasp that the supply chain is broken. It’s kept them going all their lives, even though the system sometimes dissolves into chaos, and prices go up and down like an undertaker's hat.

I think about how crazy people went when they thought there was going to be a shortage of toilet paper. Imagine being rationed to two pieces of bread a day—total.

This book is as tactile as a book can get. I smelled the stale breath, felt the cold, tasted the jars of jam and wedges of honey they so carefully hoarded, heard the cries of the hungry babies, and saw the hanging flesh and gaunt faces. It is a story of hardship, but it is also a story of sacrifice and survival and transcendent love.

What a remarkable way to begin a new year of reading.