Each item below changed my life for the better. I consistently update this page.
Books
Before compiling this short list, I went through the titles of classics and realized how uneducated I was. What is here is rather symbolic and sometimes less known.
- Beowulf
- David Herbert Donald - Lincoln (biography)
- Guy de Maupassant - The Horla (short stories)
- Jorge Luis Borges - The Aleph (short stories)
- Stendhal - The Life of Henry Brulard
- Plutarch - Parallel Lives
- Michel de Montaigne - Essays
- W. H. Auden - The Dyer's Hand (essays)
- Irvin Yalom - Becoming Myself (essays)
Essays, Articles, Speeches, Transcripts
- Richard Hamming - You and Your Research
- Stephen Greenblatt - The Answer Man
- Paul Graham - Life is Short
- David Graeber - The Rise of the Pointless Job
- Eric Steven Raymond - How To Become A Hacker
- Open Culture - Joseph Brodsky's Reading List
- Open Culture - W. H. Auden's Reading List
- Hunter S Thompson - Letter to Hume Logan
- Henry Miller - 11 Commandments of Writing
- Kurt Vonnegut - Shape of Stories
- Joseph Brodsky - Speech at the Stadium
- Joseph Brodsky - How to Read a Book
- George Orwell - Why I Write
- George Orwell - Politics and the English Language
- Harold Pinter - Art, Truth & Politics (Nobel Lecture)
Web Pages
- Paul Graham
- Eric S. Raymond
- Leslie Lamport
- Joel Spolsky
- Peter Norvig
- Andrej Karpathy
- Two Bit History
Movies
It is easier to get educated in cinema than in literature: when a usual movie can be watched under three hours, it takes at least five times more to complete a fine novel. Although, a layman always lacks the eyes of the critic, especially if the critic is none other than the great Roger Ebert. Again, it would not make sense to create a 'great movies' list (in Roger Ebert you can trust), so here are some honorable mentions.
- The Seventh Seal (1957)
- Paths of Glory (1957)
- The Leopard (1963)
- Winter Light (1963)
- Dr. Strangelove (1964)
- Le Samouraï (1967)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- The Godfather (1972, 1974)
- Chinatown (1974)
- Tütək Səsi (1975)
- Mirror (1975)
- Barry Lyndon (1975)
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
- Taxi Driver (1976)
- Nostalghia (1983)
- Scarface (1983)
- Paris, Texas (1984)
- The Sacrifice (1986)
- Full Metal Jacket (1987)
- Heat (1995)
- Hate (1995)
- The Big Lebowski (1998)
- Requiem for a Dream (1999)
- Irreversible (2002)
- Hidden (2005)
- There Will Be Blood (2007)
- No Country for Old Men (2007)
- In Bruges (2008)
- The Hunt (2012)
- Paterson (2016)
- First Reformed (2017)
- The Father (2020)
I wrote two essays on Stanley Kubrick movies: Three Duels of Barry Lyndon and Full Metal Jacket: Duality of Human Nature and Birth of Empathy.