Journalist Ekaterina Dementieva about favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask heroines about their literary preferences and editions, which occupy an important place in the bookcase. Today, journalist, editor-in-chief of social media at Yandex, curator of a journalism department at Moscow International University, and former editor-in-chief of Poster Daily Ekaterina Dementieva are talking about favorite books.
I want to apologize to the readers for the compilation, where neither Yuri Lotman, nor Michio Kaku had a place. I admit: a simple affair is to collect a list of world bestsellers (is this a hit parade from the nearest Republic?). However, my relationship with reading after thirty years is a painful attempt to break away from Facebook and the telegraph and recall the childish feeling of diving into a book with a head. If you have a similar problem, one of the ways to fight for your own attention is in front of you: reading very exciting books.
As in many Soviet homes, reading in our family went by default: parents taught English and books were common entertainment. Then I myself became a student in the English department - and all the humanities departments provide a tight list of compulsory foreign literature, from Apuleius to Umberto Eco. If you throw boring fat Germans out of this list and refresh the 20th century, this is a completely convincing set of volumes defining modern Western thinking.
We had volumes a little more modern at home: Dad worked as a translator (for example, he traveled to Iran before the Islamic Revolution Khomeini) and brought novels in paperback. Together with the scrap Dreiser and Galsworthy in our closets, the saga of Le Carré and Ken Follett multiplied. Sometimes dad cultural Updike, and in the early nineties brought home infection in the form of Ayn Rand - but, thank God, not “Atlanta”, but “Source”. Jacqueline Susan came across books about models in New York, which were tricked by various cunning, from drugs to unsuccessful plastic surgeries. It seemed to me that they would prepare me for adulthood (and they would warn me against mistakes!). It turned out like this, by the way, but it turned out that I was hiding the “Valley of the Dolls”, because the absence of a difference between highbrow and lowbrow was not yet explained.
I know that many consider reading for pleasure a waste of time - but not me. Books like The Ascent of Money and other volumes on how things really are arranged are cool, but they are more suitable for a quiet European society, rather than a turbulent flow of events in Russia. Books about personal effectiveness do not explain Pavel Durov, and Harvard futurologists do not explain the reaction of modern Russia to Pussy Riot. "Just do not learn physics at school, and your whole life will be filled with miracles and magic" - oh, it seems to be about me. On the other hand, in the era of hypercommunication, the winner is not the one who taught physics, but the one who knows how to talk and tell interestingly. My favorite authors - know how the gods.
Stephen King
"Confrontation"
Smart books about horrors and wonders are my favorite genre. “Confrontation” is a trip-novel about the great American fault, when two large wandering armies - good and evil — survive after the deadly flu virus. As usual with King, this is about the struggle of humanists with domestic violence, which takes phantasmagoric forms. If you despised King and thought he had only "Misery" and "Shine" from the good - look at the rating of New York Magazine: you will like the top ten lines. I hesitated between Neil Gaiman (who has similar "American Gods") and King, but still the king is King.
Jonathan franzen
"Amendments"
With this book, I want to say hello to my friend, the scientific editor of Radio Liberty, Sergei Dobrynin, Seryozha, ten years later, your Amendments were found. But the Franzen novel “Freedom” was lost somewhere - in fact, he is my favorite. Many consider Franzen too pompous and didactic. His books are replete with sad details from the life of adults and their (always!) Deceived expectations strung on a hopeless news agenda (from the war in Iraq to Russian hackers). They are about hypocrisy and tolerance, about mental characteristics and corporate ethics, about betrayals and sports, about birdwatching, about a critical distance from parents and children, and about mortgage, and about sex after thirty - in general, about the painful adventures of people on neuroleptics.
Roald dahl
When people ask me on Facebook: “What should I read a child of twelve years old (Harry Potter has already mastered)?”, I regularly click on the “Save” button - a lot of good things come across. I love both the classic storyteller Dahl (“Matilda”, “The Witches”), the Pullman trilogy “Dark beginnings”, and the gamer's “Koralina in the land of nightmares”, and other cemetery stories. As an illustration - a collection of Dahl's favorite stories about ghosts. I keep it more like a mindboard - I have been shy to keep it on the shelves of Rowling for decades.
Dan simmons
"Terror"
The physical sensation of death and ice cold on each page - and so for three days without stopping. I do not know if there are other ways to read this sensational book: the tragic history of the Arctic expedition "Erebus" and "Terror" (repeatedly stated in history books) is mixed with the epic of the Eskimos - I then read the Soviet "Eskimo fairy tales", something coincides. The wreckage of the ships and the personal belongings of the officers are dispersed in the maritime museums and research centers of Great Britain and Canada; AMC has released the TV series Terror, an article on Wikipedia about Terror can deprive a healthy and happy person of sleep, but still the best way to learn about the search for the Northwest Sea Passage is to pick up this creepy-green book.
Donna tartt
"Goldfinch"
Another masterpiece: I love Donna Tartt very much for Secret History and, of course, Shchegla. Adventures of Holden Caulfield after 9/11: a novel about global orphanhood, about the inner death, which is experienced by a resident of a large city after the terrorist attack. It is also a metaphor about the salvific world of the furniture workshop, in which the protagonist hides from the highly urbanized, amphetamine New York. And also about the fact that the old Dutch canvas with a small bird is more important than the whole of the new great pop culture. And no less than the book itself, I love the text about "Shchegla", which was written by Maria Stepanova.
Tom wolf
"I am Charlotte Simmons"
The beautiful journalist Svetlana Reuter told me about this book. I do not know whether all the thick novels and the “new journalism” are included in the university list of compulsory foreigners, but I would very much like to. "I - Charlotte Simmons" - an angry novel about the main lair of world sexism - an elite American university, where the humble village girl has the misfortune, the moral foundations of which are loosened over eight hundred pages.
Mikhail Gigolashvili
"Ferris wheel"
We are very fortunate to live when there are so many beautiful books in Russian, and there are people who constantly tell us about it - just one glance at the Bookmate shelf on Modern Russian Prose. For me the most evil, funny, paradoxical and very beloved book for me is the “Ferris Wheel” - a rogue novel in the spirit of Martin McDona - about how militiamen in Georgia dispersed thieves in law and drug addicts.
Julian barns
"England, England"
Many of us would be different people if it were not for Lev Danilkin's reviews in the Billboard. I was lucky for some time even to be its editor - it was a very simple job of reducing the volume of semicolons with the mass of text. Lev was and remains the ambassador of the Barnish method in Russia - starting with his first review of "England, England": "Here it is - witty, light, touching, amazingly folded, fresh and not only English, but also about the very essence of Englishness" . There has been a lot of talk about Barnes lately about "The Noise of Time" and "There is nothing to be afraid of," but I will always love without memory the very first one - an eccentric and deadly funny story about the capitalization of the territory myth as the basis of content marketing.
Ernst Gombrich
"Art History"
An invaluable source of information about books for me is my friend Ksenia Samarina, editor of the guidebooks of the Posters and Atlases of Medusa. One of her tips is Gombrich's Art History. Like Gasparov's "Entertaining Greece", it is written for high school students, but it is read by adults. It is a matter of clarity, of endlessly falling in love with the object, and of arzamasoobrazny friendliness: welcome to the magical world of the flaming gothic, now I will explain it to you in five minutes.
Guidebooks "Posters"
By the way, about guidebooks "Posters". Sometimes I read them just to calm down - especially I advise "Vienna" (the author is Ekaterina Dyogot '), "Rome" (Olga Grinkrug) and "Japan" (Daniil Dugaev). There is also a short circulation book - a collection of the best texts from the "Afisha-Mir" magazine. All these are witty and beautiful stories written by my friends: Roman Gruzovy, Andrey Loshak, Alexey Kazakov and other prominent storytellers and travelers.
Some miracles happen in almost every one of them, and if you think that this is all about Ayauku (although it suffices), then the most mystical text there is about Pushkin. In a strange way, Alexei Zimin’s Pushkin text survived all the media cataclysms and is now on the Poster site: “We had breakfast at the Svyatogor cafe. There are three pages of salads. There are salads with amazing names.” Happy gnomes, for example. ingenuously inedible. But not the point ... "