My Favorite Books

The Clown, Heinrich Boll; Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky; Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol; The Castle, Franz Kafka; The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky; A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov; Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Edwin Lefevre; Eugene Onegin, Aleksandr Pushkin; Scarlet and Black, Stendhal; Kolyma Tales, Varlam Shalamov; The Good Soldier Svejk, Jaroslav Hasek; Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald; Summer in Baden-Baden, Leonid Tsypkin; The Garden of Eden, Ernest Hemingway; This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Tadeusz Borowski; Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov; Pierre et Jean, Guy de Maupassant; The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway; Pale Fire, Nabokov; Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote; Night, Eli Weisel; The Possessed, Dostoevsky; The Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham; Hunger, Knut Hamsun; The True Story of Ah Q, Lu Hsun; Before Sunrise, Mikhail Zoshchenko; The Compromise, Sergei Dovlatov, Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine De Saint Exupery; Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl; The Book on Life Beyond, Bo Yin Ra

Francis Bacon on marriage and single life

"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men; which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public." -- from The Essays of Francis Bacon, pg. 25

Mencken on Democracy

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." -- H.L. Mencken