The author of this selection picks out eleven books that he values more than the others. In his words, the characters in these works resemble members of a support group: each of them tends to overthink. Below are the books in the order they are presented, with brief plot descriptions and the author's personal comments.

1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, "The Gambler"

The main character, Alexei, a young Russian tutor, works for a general's family. The family lives in a German resort town with a casino and is waiting for the death of a wealthy grandmother in Moscow so they can receive the inheritance. Alexei discovers roulette and believes that a single spin can solve his financial and personal problems.

In the author's view, Dostoevsky does not depict a naive person but an intelligent man who understands that he is destroying himself and still keeps going. The writer created the novel in less than a month to pay off his own gambling debts, so the experience of addiction comes across in the text authentically.

The author connects the story to his own experience: the constant hope that luck will turn in the next project, job, or video, and the inability to stop, since stopping means giving up.

2. Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions

A collection of stories in which Borges usually begins a text as an essay or historical sketch, and a few pages later an impossible event occurs.

The author particularly highlights the story "Funes the Memorious." Funes, a young resident of Uruguay, after falling from a horse, begins to remember everything: every leaf, every cloud, every second. Borges shows that thinking requires forgetting and discarding minor differences. Funes cannot let go of details, and therefore cannot think and "drowns in details."

The author admits that his own memory is selective: he remembers unpleasant episodes well, while pleasant events are recalled only in fragments.

3. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Plath uses black humor and precise observation of the surrounding world. The protagonist, Esther, is a young woman of the 1950s who receives a summer internship at a prestigious women's magazine in New York. Outwardly she lives the dream: free lunches, parties, gift bags. Inwardly her life is falling apart.

Esther pictures her life as a fig tree, where each fig corresponds to a separate future: a husband and children, a famous poet, a brilliant professor. She wants all of the options, but choosing one means losing the rest.

The author draws a parallel between this metaphor and his own experience. He grew up in a small town and chose between professions: first law, then journalism, then moving to another country at the age of 36 and starting a new career from scratch. In his assessment, none of the choices was the "right" one. The author's main conclusion: opportunities do not wait, and a decision postponed until "later" ends up being made without the person's participation.

The author also notes that Esther strives for independence and does not want to depend on men or serve them. This stance is shaped by the author's experience in a matriarchal family, where he saw how dependence on a man affected women's lives, and did not want such a fate for himself.

4. Alejandra Pizarnik, "Diana's Tree"

Argentine poet. The collection includes 38 short poems, many of which consist of several lines. The texts resemble fragments of thought rather than finished stories.

The author highlights one poem in which the lyrical heroine asks not for a long life or happiness, but for one minute lived with wide-open eyes. Then "tiny flowers" are placed in the brain: thoughts, memories, sensations. Words dance until they turn into language. In the last line, the words end up in the mouth of a person who cannot speak and get stuck in exactly the place they were supposed to come out.

The author connects this image with his own experience: an inner storm often gets reduced to the phrase "everything is fine." For a long time, he could not express his feelings because of his fear of what others would think. At 40, this fear weakened. Now the author lives in a second language and notes that he cannot convey his thoughts in it as precisely as in his native Spanish. Even in Spanish, he says, there is something he has never been able to put into words.

5. Antonio Tabucchi, "Pereira Maintains"

The action takes place in Lisbon in 1938, under the dictatorship of Salazar. Pereira, a lonely elderly journalist, edits the culture page of a newspaper. He prefers books, memories of his late wife, and his usual daily routine to what is happening on the streets.

Pereira meets the young writer Rossi, whose article about death sets the tone for the entire narrative. Rossi is an antifascist. Gradually, he makes Pereira see the repression and violence that Pereira had spent years trying not to notice.

The author compares the novel with events in his own country during the last dictatorship. The military called "subversive" anyone who disagreed with them: activists, union members, students, teachers, journalists, and sometimes people whose only "guilt" was having a name in someone else's address book. People were abducted off the streets in green cars. Prisoners were thrown from airplanes into the sea. Mothers of the disappeared walked around the Plaza de Mayo every Thursday and asked about their children.

Like Pereira, many people back then turned away out of fear, and most newspapers supported the regime. The author asks whether it is possible to remain neutral when such things are happening around you. His conclusion: one does not have to be a hero to take action, but one must not look away.

6. Ellie Brosh, "Hyperbole and a Half"

The book is based on a blog that Brosh started around 2009. It combines humorous essays and drawings resembling those made in Paint. Behind the jokes lies a serious theme of depression.

According to the author's assessment, Brosh's description of depression is one of the best he has read. She describes the condition not as simple sadness, but as an inability to care about anything, including things that previously brought joy.

The author believes that a sense of humor helps one survive difficult periods. Turning personal tragedies into creative work, in his opinion, is a way of coping with them. He notes that such books are hard to place in a single literary category: representatives of classical literature regard them dismissively, while proponents of contemporary prose consider them too traditional. The author believes that the combination of the funny and the sad reflects reality, and that writing a funny text is much harder than writing a sad one. Anyone can describe suffering on the page, but evoking laughter against that backdrop requires skill.

7. Albert Camus, The Stranger

Meursault, a Frenchman living in Algeria, seems detached from everything that happens around him. He reacts to life the way the author reacts to corporate team-building. His mother dies, but he does not cry. The next day he goes swimming, meets a woman, and goes to the cinema. After an incident on the beach, he is arrested.

At the trial, according to the author's observation, he is condemned not so much for the crime as for who he is: for not feeling the expected emotions and for not pretending in order to meet others' expectations. This episode leads to the concept of the absurd, which Camus uses in his philosophy.

Camus does not claim that the universe is cruel, since cruelty requires intention. The universe is unaware of our existence, does not reward good people, and does not punish bad ones. People seek meaning, the universe does not answer, and yet people continue to live. The author does not say whether he agrees with this position, and notes that the question itself requires separate consideration.

8. Osamu Dazai, "No Longer Human"

The novel was published in Japan in 1948. The protagonist, Oya Yozo, comes from a wealthy family and feels that he lacks something that others have. From childhood, he does not understand people and feels fear in their presence. He observes those around him like a tourist trying to figure out the rules of tipping.

Yozo creates a mask: he becomes a clown who constantly makes those around him laugh so that no one gets close to him. People consider him charming and carefree, but this is a role that hides his fear. The better he performs the role, the stronger his loneliness becomes, since no one knows his true self.

With age, his situation worsens: alcohol, chaotic relationships, and a sense of shame appear. Even when someone sincerely becomes attached to him, he cannot believe that he deserves it.

The author sees in the book a description of the feeling that others know how to live, while you merely copy them and hope that you look convincing. For many years, the author himself was so shy that he was mistaken for being arrogant. In reality, it was fear: fear of embarrassment, rejection, and ridicule. With age, he became less afraid, but, like Yozo, he uses humor to cope with difficulties. The difference, in his words, is that he does not hide behind humor or use it to please others, but uses it to make life bearable.

The book made a strong impression on the author, since it showed where such hiding can lead. The author notes that the novel is heavy, and although it is among his favorites, he will not reread it.

9. Fernando Pessoa, A Little More Than the Entire Universe

A collection of selected poems. Most writers spend their whole lives searching for a single voice; Pessoa created dozens. He invented entire poets with names, biographies, characters, and their own styles. The author highlights three main ones.

• Alberto Caeiro: the poet of nature. He sees a tree as a tree and finds other people exhausting because they search for hidden meaning in everything.
• Álvaro de Campos: the poet who feels everything at once and constantly. He is anxious, alienated, and weighed down by the very fact of existence.
• Ricardo Reis: the poet of a calm, classical manner. He writes about fate and death, restrains his feelings, and never raises his voice.

The author admits that when he first read Reis, he wondered: who would consciously choose a quiet, dull life? Now, at 40, he himself wants a simple, measured life. However, in his observation, such a life used to be what remained when everything else had failed. Today it requires a financial cushion.

The author also notes that in the book Pessoa writes in his own name, and every line is imbued with nostalgia. The author says he understands this feeling: people miss what they have lost, while he has always longed for what he never had.

10. Clarice Lispector, "The Hour of the Star"

Macabéa is a poor young woman from northeastern Brazil who lives in Rio de Janeiro. She works as a typist and barely earns anything. Her small joys are Coca-Cola, the radio, and dreams of becoming Marilyn Monroe. No one notices her, and she does not seem to realize how sad her life looks to others.

The story is told by the narrator, Rodrigo, who repeatedly interrupts the narrative to ask whether he is capable of telling Macabéa's story at all and whether he has the right to do so. The book is thus about an invisible woman and the question of what it means to write about someone else's pain. Rodrigo, the author observes, is just as unnoticed as Macabéa, but he has writing, while she has nothing creative.

The author recounts that at 20 he wanted to become a writer and wrote a great deal, but reality demanded that he pay rent. He took a job, as those do who cannot afford to live by literary work, unlike Hemingway, who lived off his wife's money in Paris. The author says he knows what it feels like to be insignificant and insecure because of a lack of money. He also notes that people who claim money is not the main thing usually have never opened a refrigerator that contains nothing but ice.

In the author's view, the main fear the book evokes is that one can lose not only happiness but also the ability to imagine it. The author differs from Macabéa in that he is aware of what is happening and tries to change it. Now he has returned to writing.

11. Franz Kafka, "The Metamorphosis"

Gregor, a traveling salesman, wakes up one morning and discovers that he has turned into a huge insect. His first concern has nothing to do with his body but with being late for the train and for work. He needs this job, and he understands that. He gives up his own desires and independence for obligations he cannot escape. The author notes that such reasoning is typical of an office worker.

After the transformation, Gregor cannot work or speak. The family, which has lived on his money, begins to see him as a burden. It turns out that their love depended on his usefulness. The author believes this is where Kafka's genius lies: the story of a man turning into an insect remains one of the most realistic family dramas.

The author asks whether people are loved for who they are or for what they give. He has been in situations where he was loved as long as he could give something. Those people no longer come into his life. The author connects Gregor with his own experience of work: the way a job consumes a person until he becomes a part of it. He worked at a corporation for 17 years, then left, built his own business, and loves that work. However, by his account, the business does not yet bring in enough income, and he is looking for a job again. Gregor kept telling himself he would quit once the money was in order. The author told himself he would never go back, and now he is rewriting his résumé.

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