Craving for a new book is like craving for a new friend - who we expect to have all the qualities of the old ones and still be able to constantly surprise us.
This is my favourite period in literature. I see it as two different strands. One side is the playful, sarcastic, somewhat cynical approach to life in Pushkin, Gogol, and Lermontov. Then there is a quiet but sweeping exploration of humanity in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov.
Marcel Proust
Many writers are good at capturing a particular emotion, a specific moment. Proust gives us not just a snapshot but the full story of the feeling, decoded in a meandering, hypnotic prose.
Where Proust excels, perhaps more than any other writer I know, is the intensity he brings to everything. There is always something that the narrator is observing so intimately, and so precisely, like a biologist who probes a single type of organism in a series of experiments, though their ultimate goal might be something as universal as understanding the laws of memory, learning or habit.
Robert Musil
The novel keeps surprising us every time the hero contemplates the boundaries of crime and morality. And every time he observes this boundary, we wonder how he will react to it. Even more, we wonder how he will define it. This is the greatness of the book - the cold possibilities for an individual imagined, the equilibrium of society analyzed. Somehow even suicide and murder don’t seem to disturb the dusty corners of our minds, as the tension between two best friends or the casual questioning of social values.
A thinking novel, baked with huge ambition and a creamy layer of lightness. Musil spent the last 20 years of his life writing it and it remains unfinished.
Alexander Pushkin
In my world, this is the best type of novel - short, deep and playful. With exquisite timing, Pushkin can keep you waiting with anticipation, or pass a few comments to make clever transitions that other writers use pages to develop. Eugene Onegin is never boring! (Check out the James Falen translation.)
The form, the transitions, the range of emotions, the storytelling; There is nothing like it. I delayed submitting my math PhD thesis so that I can include a poem written in the same rhyme pattern. Vikram Seth, when he was a graduate student in Economics, liked Eugene Onegin so much that he read it five times in one month and went on to write The Golden Gate.
Frederik Pohl
Ted Chiang
José Saramago
David Sedaris
Andrew Solomon
Robert Caro
Michael Lewis
Jane Jacobs
Edited by John Pilger
Henry Dudney
Peter Winkler
Jiri Matousek
John Conway
Richard Feynman
Amos Tversky
Emil Artin
Hugh Stretton
François Truffaut
Sidney Lumet
Marlon Brando, Robert Lindsay
Scott Frank
Stella Adler
Edited by Retha Powers and Kathy Kiernan
Chuck Palahniuk
Stephen King
Haruki Murakami