You live a book slowly, and it changes more in you than you would think. Here are the authors who caught me at the time, opened up a new view on things and events, helped me understand myself better - and some stayed close for years.
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Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1883-1945) - a Russian and Soviet writer, the famous 'Red Count'. He was one of the founders of Soviet science fiction with 'Aelita' and 'The Garin Death Ray', and also wrote the historical epic 'Peter the First', the trilogy 'The Road to Calvary' and the beloved children's tale about Buratino.
3 books
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) - a Russian writer and physician, the greatest master of the short story and a major playwright. He wrote about people without embellishment, with irony and compassion, catching the funny and the sad where others saw only everyday routine. It was he who said that brevity is the sister of talent.
1 book
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) - a British writer and physician who created Sherlock Holmes, the most famous detective in all of literature. He also wrote science fiction and historical novels, but it was Holmes and his cool logic that made him a household name. To this day the detective's method of deduction is a byword for clear, evidence-led reasoning.
4 books
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) - a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of analytical psychology. He gave us the ideas of the archetypes and the collective unconscious, and split people into introverts and extraverts. He began as Freud's pupil, then parted ways with him and went his own road.
3 books
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an English writer, the foremost novelist of the Victorian era. He published his long novels in monthly instalments, which brought them to the widest possible readership. He set vivid characters and comedy alongside a picture of the social ills of his time.
2 books
Chuck Palahniuk (b. 1962) - an American writer and a voice of the counterculture. Worldwide fame came with Fight Club. His prose is harsh, provocative and darkly funny - about violence, loneliness and the sicknesses of a consumer society.
18 books
Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988) was an American master of science fiction, famous for a quiet, pastoral style built around ordinary rural people meeting the strange and the alien. Behind the calm Midwest farmyards he asks big, gentle questions about time, kindness and humanity's place in the universe. He won the Hugo and Nebula awards and was named a Grand Master of the genre.
10 books
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) - an English writer, merchant and journalist, and one of the founders of the European novel. He came to fiction late, after a life of trade, political pamphlets and debt, and at nearly sixty he wrote Robinson Crusoe - the book that gave literature its first great story of a person alone against nature. His prose is plain, precise and convincing: he writes as if he were simply reporting fact, and that matter-of-fact voice is exactly what makes an invented world feel real.
3 books
Dmitry Glukhovsky (b. 1979) is a Russian science fiction writer, author of the post-apocalyptic novel Metro 2033 and its sequels. His later books, among them Future and Text, moved from the underground world of the Metro toward the present-day city and the people living in it.
8 books
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) - an American writer and poet, a master of the dark tale and one of the inventors of the horror story itself. He gave the world the detective with his logic and deduction, shaped the horror and science fiction that came after him, and tuned his ear on poems like 'The Raven'. His own life was a hard one - poverty, loss, and an early, mysterious death at forty.
1 book
Eric Berne (1910-1970) - an American psychiatrist and the creator of transactional analysis. He explained human relationships through the idea of 'games' and the three ego-states we speak from - Parent, Adult and Child. His bestseller 'Games People Play' turned a clinical theory into a plain way of reading everyday life.
2 books
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) - an American self-taught philosopher, the 'longshoreman philosopher'. For years he lived as a migrant worker, then loaded ships on the San Francisco docks and wrote his books about people and society in whatever hours were left. The True Believer made his name, and in 1983 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
1 book
Erich Fromm (1900-1980) - a German-American philosopher, psychoanalyst and sociologist. He wrote about freedom and love, about human alienation and about the way a consumer society reshapes us from within. His Escape from Freedom and The Art of Loving became classics long ago and still read like a conversation about ourselves today.
3 books
Frédéric Beigbeder (b. 1965) - a French writer, a former advertising man and society critic. His ironic, cynical and confessional prose is about glamour, love and the emptiness of the consumer world, and he became famous with the novel 99 Francs. He writes about his own time from the inside, laughing and wincing at once.
10 books
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) - a Russian writer whose novels looked into the darkest and brightest depths of the human soul. He passed through prison, poverty and gambling, and all of it became his prose - about guilt, freedom, faith and the price of a human life.
4 books
Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) was a Colombian writer and winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is one of the central figures of Latin American magical realism.
12 books
George Orwell (1903-1950) - an English writer and essayist, real name Eric Blair. He fought in Spain, knew poverty and colonial service first-hand, and wrote all his life against totalitarianism and the lie. His «1984» gave the world Big Brother and Newspeak.
2 books
H. G. Wells (1866-1946) was an English writer and one of the founding fathers of science fiction. He invented the plots that became the genre's canon - time travel, alien invasion, invisibility - and largely shaped the language science fiction still speaks. He was also a social thinker, forever turning over the future of society and the fate of humankind.
9 books
H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American writer, the founder of 'cosmic horror' - the dread not of a monster but of an indifferent, unknowable universe in which humankind counts for nothing. His tales of sleeping gods and forbidden knowledge grew into the Cthulhu Mythos and shaped the whole of the horror that came after him. He published in cheap pulp magazines and died in obscurity, winning his fame only after his death.
14 books
Harry Harrison (1925-2012) was an American science fiction writer known for adventurous and satirical storytelling. He is best remembered for the roguish Stainless Steel Rat series and the novel Deathworld, while Make Room! Make Room! pictured an overpopulated future. His books mix fast adventure with a humane, mocking eye for war and the folly of power.
17 books
Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) was a Polish writer and winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best known for his historical novels: the 'Trilogy' about the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 'Quo Vadis' about Rome under Nero, and 'The Knights of the Cross' about the war with the Teutonic Order. In Poland he is read as one of the foremost national authors.
2 books
Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) - a nineteenth-century French writer, creator of the vast Human Comedy: dozens of linked novels and stories about the manners and passions of his age. He worked himself to the bone, writing through the night, and laid a whole society bare - from the salons of Paris to the deep provinces.
3 books
Ilya Ilf (1897-1937) and Yevgeny Petrov (1902-1942) were Soviet satirists who worked as a pair, writing as a single author. Together they created the duology about the crook Ostap Bender - The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf - which passed into common speech and became a classic of Russian satire. Both died young: Ilf of tuberculosis, Petrov as a war correspondent at the front.
3 books
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) - an American writer and scientist, one of the founding fathers of modern science fiction. He gave the world the Three Laws of Robotics and the sweeping Foundation saga, and wrote clearly about almost everything, from atoms to the Galaxy. A tireless explainer, he made science feel like an adventure.
7 books
Jack London (1876-1916) - an American writer, the singer of the North, the Klondike and the sea. He went through the gold rush, tramping and hard labour himself, and turned it all into prose about willpower, nature and the fight to stay alive.
5 books
Jonathan Littell (b. 1967) - an American-French writer. For years he worked in humanitarian missions in the world's hardest places, including Chechnya, and that closeness to violence runs through his work. Worldwide fame came with the novel The Kindly Ones, which won the Goncourt Prize. He writes about cruelty and the nature of evil.
1 book
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) - an Anglo-Irish writer, cleric and the sharpest satirist in the English language. As Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, he turned his pen against cant, cruelty and human folly wherever he found them, often hiding his anger behind a perfectly calm, reasonable voice. Gulliver's Travels made him famous the world over, but the same cold irony runs through everything he wrote.
6 books
Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) - a Russian and American poet. In Leningrad he was put on trial for 'parasitism' and sent into internal exile, and a few years later expelled from the country for good. Abroad he became one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century and won the Nobel Prize in 1987. His central subjects were time, language and exile.
1 book
Jules Verne (1828-1905) - a French writer, the founding father of science fiction and the modern adventure novel. Long before the machines themselves existed, he sent his heroes under the sea, to the Moon and around the whole planet, and got a startling amount of it right. Above all he sang of science, courage and the sheer hunger to discover.
8 books
Karel Čapek (1890-1938) was a Czech writer, playwright and science-fiction author. He introduced the word 'robot' into the world's languages, in the play R.U.R., and wrote the dystopian novel War with the Newts. He also worked as a journalist and wrote short stories, plays and travel books.
2 books
Lion Feuchtwanger (1884-1958) was a German writer and a master of the intellectual historical novel. An anti-fascist whose books were burned in 1933, he spent the second half of his life in exile in France and the United States. Behind the distant eras of his novels the present day is always visible.
13 books
Mariam Petrosyan (b. 1969) is an Armenian and Russian writer and artist. She is the author of a single novel, The Gray House, which she worked on for nearly two decades and which became a cult book after its 2009 publication.
1 book
Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) - a Russian poet of the Silver Age, whose verse burns with an almost unbearable honesty. She lived through revolution, poverty and long years of emigration, then returned to the Soviet Union only to meet loss and a tragic end. What remains is poetry of extraordinary force and openness about love and pain.
1 book
Mark Twain (1835-1910) - an American writer and satirist, often called the father of American literature. He gave the world Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, boys who feel as alive today as they did on the banks of the Mississippi. Behind the humour lies a sharp eye for society, freedom and human nature.
4 books
Maurice Druon (1918-2009) - a French writer and public figure, best known for the seven-novel saga "The Accursed Kings" about the fall of the Capetian dynasty in 14th-century France. A member of the Academie francaise and a minister of culture, he also helped write the wartime "Song of the Partisans". George R. R. Martin has called the saga a chief inspiration for Game of Thrones.
7 books
Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) was a Russian and Soviet writer, playwright and publicist, and one of the founders of socialist realism in literature. He came up from years of wandering and early romantic short stories to major prose and plays that became fixtures of the school curriculum.
2 books
Michel Houellebecq (b. 1956) - a French writer, the most controversial author in France today. His cold, precise prose is about loneliness, sex, consumerism and the decline of the West, offered with no comfort and almost no hope. A winner of the Goncourt Prize, he has long been a living classic - a prophet to some readers, a provocateur to others.
8 books
Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) was a Spanish writer, the author of Don Quixote. His main book became one of the first examples of the modern European novel and one of the most widely read works in world literature. He also wrote pastoral and adventure prose, novellas, poetry and plays.
4 books
Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) - a Russian writer and playwright, a doctor by training. He wrote about the fate of the intelligentsia during the revolution, about power, and about a devil who comes to set things right. His major novel, The Master and Margarita, appeared a quarter of a century after his death and became a legend.
8 books
Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) - a Russian poet and prose writer, heir to Pushkin and the voice of rebellious solitude. In only a handful of years he gave Russian literature the novel A Hero of Our Time and piercing verses about freedom, love and fate. He was killed in a duel at twenty-six, leaving behind the sense of a genius cut short.
4 books
Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894-1958) was a Russian satirist and a master of the short comic story. He wrote about the daily life of the little man in the crowded Soviet communal apartment in the plain, slightly tongue-tied language of his own characters, behind which hides a precise and sad eye. Hugely popular in his lifetime, he was all but silenced after a Party campaign against him in 1946.
6 books
Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) - a Russian writer in whom the comic and the terrifying always stand side by side. He began with cheerful Ukrainian folk tales and arrived at a dark satire of all Russia. He burned the second volume of Dead Souls himself, shortly before his death.
6 books
O. Henry (1862-1910) - the pen name of William Sydney Porter, an American master of the short story, famous for warm, witty tales that snap shut on a sudden twist. He wrote about ordinary New Yorkers - clerks, shop girls and drifters - with humour and sympathy. Behind the cheerful stories lay a hard life that even included a spell in prison, where he began to write in earnest.
3 books
Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) - a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer. In his own time he was known above all as a scholar who solved cubic equations and reformed the calendar more precisely than the one we use today. To the wider world, though, he lives on through his rubaiyat - short, daring quatrains about the meaning of life, wine and death, full of doubt.
1 book
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish writer and playwright, a master of the aphorism and one of the central figures of the Aesthetic movement. He is remembered for his sparkling comedies, his fairy tales and his single novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
1 book
Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950) - an Anglo-Italian writer and the king of the historical adventure novel. He won the world over with tales of dashing rogues who kept a code of honour - the pirate Captain Blood, the swordsman Scaramouche - full of sea spray, sharp wit and stubborn love. Few authors have made courage read so lightly.
3 books
Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) - an American writer, a poet of science fiction. He wrote not about technology but about people, childhood, fear and love, in a warm and living voice. Fahrenheit 451 became the definitive book about what happens when books are burned.
7 books
Richard K. Morgan (b. 1965) is a British writer of hard, violent science fiction and grim fantasy. He broke through with Altered Carbon, which won the Philip K. Dick Award and became a Netflix series. His books keep circling the same nerve: violence, identity, and the body as something you can wear, swap and throw away.
8 books
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) - a Scottish writer and traveller, a master of adventure and of the mind's darker corners. He gave the world the pirate romance of Treasure Island and the grim parable of a man's double nature in Jekyll and Hyde. He wandered far and wrote without pause, all while fighting the frail health that shadowed his whole life.
3 books
Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, one of the leading voices of the New Wave. A winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, he is best known for the Chronicles of Amber and the novel Lord of Light.
21 books
Sergei Dovlatov (1941-1990) was a Russian writer, one of the authors of the third wave of emigration. After moving to the United States he became known for short, ironic prose about Soviet everyday life and the life of emigrants, told plainly and without pressure.
9 books
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) - an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis. He introduced the ideas of the unconscious, the meaning of dreams, repression, and the way childhood shapes adult life. Freud overturned how we see the human mind and taught us to look for the hidden causes behind what people do.
3 books
Stanisław Lem (1921-2006) - a Polish writer, science-fiction author and thinker. He wrote about humanity's encounter with the incomprehensible - a thinking ocean, machines, the self. A scientist by temperament, he turned science fiction into philosophy.
2 books
Stephen King (b. 1947) is an American writer, often called the king of horror and one of the most widely published authors in the world. He writes about fear taking root in quiet New England towns and in ordinary people, and holds the tension to the last page.
31 books
Arkady (1925-1991) and Boris (1933-2012) Strugatsky - the foremost science-fiction writers of the Soviet era. They wrote not about technology but about people and conscience: how to stay human when you can do anything, and whether one has the right to interfere in another's fate. Their books outran their time and became classics.
12 books
Thomas Erikson (b. 1965) - a Swedish behaviour and communication expert and the author of the bestseller Surrounded by Idiots. He made the four-colour personality model (based on DISC) famous, sorting people into red, yellow, green and blue types. He writes in a light, down-to-earth way about understanding others and getting along with all sorts of people.
5 books
Venedikt Erofeev (1938-1990) was a Russian writer, the author of the prose poem Moscow to the End of the Line. A defining figure of the late-Soviet literary underground, he was published in his lifetime mostly abroad and in samizdat.
4 books
Victor Pelevin (b. 1962) - the most enigmatic Russian writer of our time, an almost complete recluse who rarely lets himself be photographed and often hides behind dark glasses. He mixes Buddhism, cyberpunk and biting satire on consumerism and power, and turns out a new novel almost every year. His cult books Buddha's Little Finger and Generation P became landmarks of post-Soviet fiction.
25 books
Vladimir Sorokin (b. 1955) is a Russian writer, one of the major prose authors of our time and a key figure of Russian conceptualism. He began with works that pushed the language of the Soviet era into the absurd, and later turned to dystopias about Russia's past and future.
15 books
Vladimir Voinovich (1932-2018) was a Russian writer and satirist, best known for the comic saga of the soldier Ivan Chonkin and the dystopia Moscow 2042. He mocked Soviet bureaucracy and dogma, was expelled from the Writers' Union and stripped of his citizenship, and spent years in exile before returning to Russia.
8 books
William Gibson (b. 1948) is an American-Canadian writer, the father of cyberpunk and the man who gave us the word cyberspace. His 1984 debut Neuromancer swept the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards and rewired what science fiction could be. Ever since, he has read the near future straight out of the present, one of the sharpest observers of the digital age.
11 books
Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a Russian writer and naval engineer by training. He wrote 'We', the dystopian novel that was banned in the Soviet Union and shaped Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' and Huxley's 'Brave New World'. His prose ranges from the Russian provinces to revolutionary Petrograd; he spent his last years in exile in Paris.
6 books