Books like Notes from Underground — picked by fans

I laughed out loud and had moments of deep philosophical reflection, normally at the same time, with this book. I loved the clever and deep meanings and parodies of faith and the divine. I think that this book taught me to always take things with a pinch of salt, and I started thinking critically because of it.

I could not stop reading it and devoured the other books in the series and I think this is one of my favourite authors. I am inspired to emulate some aspects of the author’s thinking and this book is why. 

I was riveted in a world of young boys searching for more than just a body. So much of coming-of-age stories delve deep into the minds of these kids as they navigate both the familiar and unfamiliar. I was lifted to a time and place that resonates with my desire for nostalgia.

In this classic, Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, famously wakes up one morning to discover that he is a gigantic vermin.

Interpretations of the book range from Kafka trying to say that modern life reduces us all to being bugs, to the idea that Kafka was really writing about art, and how, since the artist cannot ever be understood, he might as well be an insect.

I read it as Kafka's attempt to reconcile two philosophies - that of Nietzsche, who claimed that the human will is a force that leads to happiness, and that of Schopenhauer, who claimed that the will is just about survival.

In Kafka's hands, metamorphosis is both life-affirming and life-denying. 

It’s the voice that gets me with We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Merricat Blackwood is such a strange, chilling young narrator. Mysterious and vaguely unsettling, I could never be sure whether to believe her version of events. Or not.

Plus, it has some of my favourite story ingredients: a family tragedy, a murder trial, an unwelcome visitor, and a little bit of magic. 

I was recommended this book as a teenager by someone I deeply respect and admire. I’ve come back to it a lot, most recently from a hospital bed with an epidural in my spine. I think the book lifted more pain then than the drip.

Resurrection was the last novel Tolstoy wrote and it led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. It’s a complex quasi-love story about a beautifully flawed protagonist’s struggle to give away all the land he owns out of a tangle of duty, guilt, and a wide-eyed love for his fellow human.

In 19thC Russia, that’s extremely complicated: economically, socially, ethically, spiritually. It’s about why anyone can claim to ‘own’ anything, what fairness looks like to different people, and whether it’s possible to enjoy life while rampantly battling to perfect yourself (short answer: no).

The novel plays out on vast tracts of peasant-farmed land, dank,… show more.

I found this book to be full of insights into Russian thinking and culture. I never met Hingley, but would have loved to—his work has had a real influence on my own approach to studying and thinking about Russia. I find him a fluent writer who can take complex and controversial subjects and make them accessible. This is such a rich book. Hingley tries to explain problems of perspective in thinking about a different culture, before moving on to address a wide range of themes from Russian literature to history, geography, and politics. Times and attitudes change, but I find that it helps to frame some persistent questions about Russian life, and this book is such a good way to understand how things do—and don’t—happen in Russia. 

Russia in the 1990s was a strange place in a strange time, and Andrew Miller does a great job of capturing some of that strangeness in some of its more revolting extremes.

It’s fiction – supposedly - but the parallel world it describes will be instantly recognisable to anyone who was there or even brushed its edges. And if you weren’t, I think this is a better explanation of what happened than plenty of serious history books. And that, in turn, is essential for understanding where Russia is today – thirty years later, but with the echo of the mad years still shaping the country now. 

I found it hard to choose between several of Edward Crankshaw’s books explaining Russia. Each, in its own way, uncovers a particular aspect of history or society that makes the country what it is. In the end, I settled on this, his first: published in 1947, not long after Crankshaw had been posted to Moscow during WWII, and while he was still reeling from the vast gulf between what he experienced there and the image of the USSR that was being sold abroad. 

Crankshaw was sometimes accused of being too sympathetic to Russia, but while he does his best to explain why the country behaves as it does, he doesn’t seek to excuse it. For that reason I find this one of the most clear-headed appraisals of Russia. And given the continuities that run through all of Russian history, his rationalising of how Russia works and what it does is… show more.

Walter Benjamin was a Jewish German philosopher who escaped Nazi Germany only to commit suicide upon arrival in Spain.

This book captures an earlier time in his life, when he was still hopeful, an idealist in search of intellectual adventures and political transformation. He went to Moscow to define his political vision and found a city both seductive and elusive. The intense winter scenes in the deep Muscovite cold are unforgettable, even though he mentions them almost in passing.

Benjamin had another reason to go to Moscow: he was in love. But the woman he wished to pursue was also elusive, unavailable both in practical and emotional terms. The book speaks to the fascination Western leftist intellectuals have had with Russian culture and politics, turning to Russia as an alternative to a corrupt West.

Benjamin’s reflections about philosophy, history, and the Moscow of the 1920s makes me fantasize about our… show more.

Luke Harding is a journalist who has spent many years as The Guardian correspondent in Ukraine including the present war.

The book is a mixture of historical analysis and on-the-spot reporting which makes it read like a thriller. It is vivid and at times harrowing, particularly the reports from Bucha after the massacres there. Harding pulls no punches, arguing the brutality of the war comes from Putin himself: ‘His apparent goal: the annihilation of a country, a culture and its citizens.’

Complicit in this genocidal operation are the Russian media elite who frequently openly call for the extermination of the Ukrainian nation. An excellent account from an impeccable source.