Fiction
Statue of the protagonists in 12 Chairs by Ilf and Petrov
The Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series - Douglas Adams
Don’t let the Vogons grind you down.
A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles
A great read if you are familiar with soviet history or interested.
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexander Dumas
Find out how the real world works.
The Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu
The Foundation Series - Issac Asimov
All the King’s Men - Robert Penn Warren
“I could lie there as long as I wanted, and let all the pictures of things a man might want run through my head, coffee, a girl, money, a drink, white sand and blue water, and let them all slide off, one after another, like a deck of cards slewing slowly off your hand. Maybe the things you want are like cards. You don't want them for themselves, really, though you think you do. You don't want a card because you want the card, but because in a perfectly arbitrary system of rules and values and in a special combination of which you already hold a part the card has meaning. But suppose you aren't sitting in a game. Then, even if you do know the rules, a card doesn't mean a thing. They all look alike.”
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
The devil visits Moscow after a 300 year absence and is surprised to find communism. In parallel contains an amazing fictionalized re-imagining of the story of Pontius Pilate executing Jesus…Pontius, normally a cold blooded bureaucrat (reminiscent of a Soviet secret police functionary), decides to spare the remarkable Jesus but is, in the end, forced to execute him due to the constraints of bureaucracy.
Heart of a Dog - Mikhail Bulgakov
Kotlovan “The Foundation Pit” - Andrei Platonov
I read Platonov in the original Russian, not sure about the quality of translations. Nothing else reads like Kotlovan (except maybe for other Platonov books):
““And why are you dying, Mama? From being bourgeois — or from death?’“‘I got bored,” said the mother. ‘I’m worn out.’””
It is written completely in Russian “party speak” (similar to newspeak from the novel 1984). Description of protagonist digging the doomed ‘foundation pit,’ a surreal construction project set in post revolutionary Russia:
“He sighed, deciding to reengage in class warfare, and with a swing of his pick-axe struck the reactionary dirt which, in its old fashioned inability to shift despite the historical necessity, stood in the way of building Communism.”
Chevengur - Andrei Platonov
Another surreal masterpiece by Platonov. Some red army veterans are sent to the countryside spread the message that communism has begun and get thoroughly depressed.
12 Chairs - Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov
The Little Golden Calf - Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov
The Good Soldier Švejk - Jaroslav Hasek
I was very surprised to find that Czech people aren’t that serious about Svejk, their national hero in my eyes.
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
The WW2 version of The Good Soldier Svejk.
The Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
King Lear - William Shakespeare
Dune - Frank Herbert
Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Rabbit Novels - John Updike
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - Philip K Dick
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
It keeps coming true…
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Amazing on audio-book with British accent. Worth re-reading as an adult.
Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein
Defines the very important word “Grok.”
