Geographer Sofia Gavrilova about favorite books

IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask journalists, writers, scholars, curators, and other heroines about their literary preferences and publications, which occupy an important place in their bookcase. Today, Oxford cartographer Sofia Gavrilova shares her stories about favorite books.

Since childhood, I was told that the only thing worth doing was climbing trees and collecting robots, although I had Barbie and I loved them very much: as time passed, I realized that one does not interfere with one another. It is not clear how the books appeared when she was small: they were just in a huge family library. My father, while not engaged in music, was associated with publishing, my mother reprinted samizdat on a typewriter "Eric". She read to me a lot and taught to read the world children's classics: I know the Chronicles of Narnia by heart, and because of Tolkien I became a cartographer. I drew Middle Earth endlessly, trying to understand the route line and the intersection of the habitat zones of all its characters. So understanding and living spaces with my own laws has become my favorite task since early childhood.

The active desire of new non-classical books coincided with the advent of personal adult space. Later, I had to share the library with my parents and sister - for me it was a life stage and a certain injury: it suddenly turned out that it was time to accumulate books at home. A book in the country and reading as in a sanatorium was the main summer occupation of all adult life - and still, in order to immerse myself in fiction, I need to go to the Greek island without a phone and with a suitcase of books. Otherwise, the lists with the obligatory reading of the novels do not decrease.

I am a very emotional person and I react sharply to everything, whatever it may concern - books, cinema or personal experience, and then it is removed somewhere. For me, there is no harder question than to name the top ten of something loved. I most often do not remember what influenced me on the texture, all the strong impressions come up later - scenes, pictures, sensations, points on the map for me all of a sudden.

The world that exists under other laws and is subject to its own logic with the rules of the game, is something that has always impressed me in science fiction and literature in general. I really love the text, because it frees up space for visual images. He does not dictate or do his work for the reader. For example, I have never been excited by pornography and erotica, but erotic texts absolutely work with me. Where there is an opportunity to build and finish, I feel like a fish in water. I do not like illustrations and the literalness with which they select my fantasies.

My tragedy, like many people reading, is connected with the move. After living in England, my already fragmented library became even more fragmented. Now I find books in several habitats, the most expensive shore is closer to me and I constantly see familiar names on the bookshelves of friends - they bring me back to my memory about everything read and learned.

Alexandra Brushteyn

"The road goes into the distance ..."

The most important book of my life, my hearth, rear and base, the best girlish book in my biography: I read it at six, I now know by heart and I often dream about it. This is the writer's autobiography and an important Soviet book that many people read in former times. The story of an ordinary girl from the city of Vilna, living at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries, is a typical portrait of the hero against the background of the century. She is Jewish, which does not bulge, but plays a certain role. A simple linear history of growing up, first problems, relationships with parents, grandmother and nanny.

The book contains many historical events that are mentioned on a tangent, but have resonance in Russian history - for example, the Yakut monastic riot, the Dreyfus case, the trial against the Udmurt pagans, which I learned about for the first time from this book. Since the book examines the life of a girl before her departure to Petersburg with the aim of enrolling in higher female courses, I grew up with this book and kept returning to it all the time.

Gerald durrell

"Talking bundle"

Darrell is all my love, my childhood and my parents. This is Greece - a country of dreams, in which, after the opening of borders, I regularly rested with my family in the summer. Parents always found the opportunity to take us to the sea: it was a simple home in Corfu, where we just swam, sunbathed, ate tasty, read books and drank wine from a very young age. In Corfu, Darrell lived for a long time and invented the world in which teenagers are in love. Incredible creatures, basilisks who capture the planet, made a huge impression on me. And this book is connected with my mother: I remember how she read it to me for the night.

Paolo Giordano

"Solitude of prime numbers"

The most poignant book I have read about loneliness, a love affair with a simple and understandable analogy about the difficulty of convergence. In mathematics, there is the concept of twin numbers, which are located in the row closest to each other, like 11 and 13, between which there is another number. Roman Giordano is a story about people who live in a happy and lonely state, but there is always another number — close but never very close. Well, as you know, prime numbers are not divisible by anything except themselves and ones.

The book perfectly conveys the feeling of the impossibility of a person to overcome himself for conditional social happiness and in the name of the strange laws of self-preservation. I took the book of Giordano as a call for loneliness, and my mother commented on this book, arguing that such people annoy her — self-absorbed and drunken daffodils or egoists.

Mario Vargas Llosa

"War of the end of the world"

This novel was recommended to me by a friend before going to Latin America, to Brazil. All Latin American literature is incredibly close to me, but Llosa is the last major form in my writing biography, which works with the historical context, national culture and social problems. A free, accurate and intimate treatment of the facts of history in books always interested me. Llosa collects on beads the history of asocial characters who are trying to construct a society out of nothing. Whom he chooses and who these builders, thrown off by the centrifuge and thrown to the sidelines, is a separate conversation. People in the negative degree for some parameter with love they add up in a convincing and complex construct.

Christopher Priest

"The overturned world"

Ledger in which temporal-spatial coordinates are substituted. As is often the case in science fiction, what is happening is more or less due to about the middle. City dwellers of an unknown city put rails in order to set the city in motion - at the points where the curvature of space occurs and the three-dimensional world turns into a two-dimensional one. According to the laws of the genre there is one who doubts the correctness of the life support system of the city. Roughly speaking, he asks: "Why do we put the rails and what will it lead to?" On the one hand, this is a book about an alternative view of the unimaginable world, and on the other, the history of personal rebellion in a rigid hierarchy.

Montgomery Otwater

"Avalanche hunters"

When I wanted to enter the geofak, I dreamed of doing avalanches and physical geography. I was not taken to the department, I cried for a long time and came to the laboratory. My wonderful scientific leaders, who greatly influenced my life, gave me this book and asked me to return to the conversation in a month.

Otwater describes 20 years of experience in the avalanche service in a fascinating and beautiful language, explaining how to save people and predict cataclysms. The rescue rush, the snow-capped mountains — everything so fascinated me that I worked with avalanches for several more years and defended my candidate’s work on them. This book professionally oriented me, but unfortunately I didn’t try to cut the slope on skis like Montgomery.

Stephen Hawking

"A Brief History of Time"

When people explain complex and interesting things without tearing their nose, - in my opinion, this is very cool. Hawking was read to me by the holes, half is not understood, something is explained with the help of Wikipedia, something by comments of friends-physicists. I admire the exact calculations and designs that can explain the world, ahead of modern philosophy, and Hawking's approach is very close to me. He tries to grasp the immensity and describe the laws by which everyone and everything functions.

Mo Yan

"Country of Wine"

The books of Mo Yan are, in my understanding, epic at the level of “Buddenbrooke” or “The Quiet Don”, literary critics will probably blame me for it. The usual format from school is the history of the country through the history of the family. Very poorly versed in the complexities of Chinese history, I read with pleasure capacious and classical structures with historical motifs. I also like another book by Mo Yang - Big Breast, Wide Ass, which I read first. "Country of Wine" - about the half-myth, the existence of monkeys that crush wine from grapes in a natural way, and the institute of wine that is looking for this wine.

I, as an enophile, could not pass by this book at all - if there is a hero in the book writing his candidate’s post by monkey-made wine, I dissolve and lose my will. "The Land of Wine" consists of semi-pagan cults, fantasies and folk myths that are closely intertwined - and it is unclear where one begins and the other ends. Ishiguro's book "Inconsolable", which feels like me, is designed according to the laws of nightmare and bad sleep: the doors do not open, time goes back, I want to throw the book out on the third page, but it's impossible to tear myself away.

Jerry brotton

"A History of the World in 12 Maps"

The book was found by me on some collapse in Paris. She greatly influenced me, including the work I am doing now. This is a story about the construction of a picture of the world through 12 world maps of different eras. The approach is quite pop, but in this case it is very precise: geopolitics here is tied to cartography, and cultural science is tied to the historical context. Obviously, how does a Eurocentric view represent the world around and what happens when it is replaced by an amerikocentric one. The change of projections over time, the distortion of the proportions of countries and continents - all this book Brotton explains in detail.

Herta Muller

"Heart beast"

Romanian prose, which is very relevant nowadays and even hurt me. This is a story about a group of four friends-students during the totalitarian regime in the border of Romania and how each of them breaks down individually and their friendship under the influence of difficult circumstances. In general, the typical history of the relationship of people at the moment when the question is an edge. The story of a choice made many times was written in an incredible language with an emphasis and an appeal to basic inner feelings: smells, feelings at home, and notions about betrayal.

Romain gary

"Woman's Light", "Your ticket is not valid further", "Save our souls"

A very important writer for me with inimitable stories about loneliness. Feels like many of his books are late autumn and the last sad love. Gary, I discovered five years ago and come back to him from time to time. I can not read it constantly for the reason that he knows how to unbalance me and plant a difficult grain in me. It is necessary to dose.