Behind each talent is another – the one that once sat down at a typewriter or picked up a pen and created an inspiring text, which eventually became the key to dramatic changes. This is how the fates of famous artists and artists, inventors and scientists, politicians and journalists were built - you can list endlessly.
We bring to your attention a selection of a dozen books that changed the fate of our great contemporaries, and we hope that these works will be able to change yours.
Jeff Bezos, The Rest of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The owner of a multibillion-dollar fortune and the founder of the transnational online store "Amazon" initially made his brainchild for the book trade. But soon everyone appreciated the convenience of the format and first also began to sell movies on discs, and then everything else.
Is it any wonder that Bezos loves to read?
His favorite book tells the story of a butler named Stevens. This is the most ordinary extraordinary person who, on his chosen path, strives for impeccable perfection. That's just he fell in love with the housekeeper, who was his colleague, and is trying to convince her to return to the service in the estate.
According to our hero, this book is perfect. In addition, there is a parallelism with his own work: what they do is ordinary, but impossible nowhere else.
Natalie Portman: David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas
The actress was so amazed by this work that she made it an invariable gift, supplying the book to her friends and buddies for several years. The work is intertwined with six stories scattered on timelapse.
According to Portman, this is a beautiful, interesting and challenging book - the best she has ever read.
Richard Branson: "Peter Pan" by James Barry
It is argued that the books we read as children have a lasting impression on our behavioral model. I testify that this is so: a textbook on analytical chemistry, carefully stored under the pillow, did not go unnoticed.
A similar example can boast of the founder of the British "Virgin Group" Sir Richard Branson. He was in weightlessness, having learned to fly without wings, and he is not going to get older, in his own words. Perhaps among the living, he is closest to the hero of the book about the boy who does not want to return home and grow up.
Jack Kerouac: "Ulysses" by James Joyce
Kerouac was the idol of the hippie generation and their followers, having a tremendous impact on the North American literary tradition. The idol of the Beatniks himself claimed that of all those who painted him, the most inspired was the inimitable Irishman Joyce.
He often used the technique of streams of consciousness borrowed from the latter, and having completed work on the work "On the Road", he wrote to the Nobel laureate Ginsberg that, looking back, he finds his work similar to "Ulysses" - and calls to treat it with the same degree of seriousness.
- Donna Tartt: Books by Charles Dickens
One of the interviews with Tartt told that the author as a child had a great affection for Dickens' books. In general, there are many reasons to feel this author, but Donna believes that he is incredibly capacious and versatile, perfectly stylizes the text and tells it wonderfully. In addition, his books demonstrate a rare cordiality for contemporaries.
It was this great Englishman who inspired her to write texts devoid of room for the boring and predictable.
Elon Musk: "Atlas shrugged" Ayn Rand
Who else could the man who sent his red convertible into space name? The idea of the three volumes is simple: the world is driven and held by talented lonely creators, whom the author (our compatriot, by the way) compares with Atlanta - a mythical character whose share it fell to hold the vault of the sky.
And here – if people stop being creative, our society will collapse, which is what happens in the book, on the pages of which the government in the struggle for social justice makes free enterprise impossible.
The idea is not original, but not indisputable.
James Dean: "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
According to our hero, this book is for children, but written for adults: a kind of thoughtful sequel to Peter Pan, a story about how disappointment with adult life manifests itself, how important an unbiased opinion, curiosity and a sharp mind are.
Dean it was so important that the best friend and author of the biography of the deceased in a car accident artist noted it in the record on the monument installed near the scene of the incident. The inscription reads: "The main thing remains invisible to the eye." And just below is an explanation indicating that these lines are from James Dean's favorite book – and that he often read it to his loved ones.
Friedrich Nietzsche: novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky
For the great German sex therapist and founder of psychoanalysis, our compatriot was among the greatest artists and the most important discoveries in life. Despite the fact that the German met Fyodor Mikhailovich at a very mature age, he in his collection "Twilight of the great, or how to philosophize with a hammer", dated 88, noted: "Dostoevsky is the only luminary of psychology capable of teaching me anything; our acquaintance is the greatest success and gift of my life."
Stephen King: "God sees the truth, but will not soon say" Leo Tolstoy
You're probably aware of King's list of best-known work, Rita Heitworth and the Shawshank Redemption. And if you love Russian literature of the XIX century, you probably know that the plot is borrowed from the book of Lev Nikolaevich.
Ray Bradbury: "Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck
Read at the age of eighteen, the book, according to the writer, became a significant piece of his life path and part of the soul. In the "Martian Chronicles" you can find a number of references, which Bradbury himself explained as follows: they say, in Steinbeck, each chapter has nothing to do with the plot, it is about descriptive, metaphorical, poetry in prose. And in the "Martian Chronicles" this is not an accident, but a conscious borrowing of structural elements.
