Among books

French: Romain Rolland: Jean-Christophe
An idealistic novel to be recommended singularly for its intense joy of life. An artist's life during development and perfection, a spiritual and struggling voice out of the European mess and motion.

French: Colette
Sensual life as narcotics - Colette being the only known author to transform scent to words or paint with the palate. What more can you wish for than a queer garderner and stage personality?

German: Heinrich Böll
Wise and sensitive Nobel prize winner. Accused for being communist or terrorist he used to answer "I'm a Catholic", which meant individual charity and belonging. But Böll is the opposite of apolitical as he's a brilliant analyser of human psyche within a social system.

three Swedes:
- Selma Lagerlöf
Her two Jerusalem novels, a narration of 19th century peasants emigrating to the Holy land, are a masterpiece of psychological insight into the personal dramas of those fellow beings we used to call "little people".
The Löwensköld trilogy is an intricately woven family tale. At its centre there are the good and bad actions of strong women and headstrong men, and their love, depicted at its various stages such as fresh rosy amour or steady horselike companionship. An oeuvre on level with C.Brontë.
- Erik Axel Karlfeldt
Our greatest poet, an architect and musician of Swedish language. In complex rhymes he captures an agricultural world all gone, but his feelings of yearning or his reverence of nature will never be outdated.
- Astrid Lindgren
Unlike the other two Swedes she never got the Nobel prize, as she "only wrote for children". She offers literature in its own right to children, not a pygmy version of grownup notions, and she lets her imagination lose in a range from psychological novels of development (Ronja the robber's daughter), hilarious comedy (the series of Karlsson or Pippi Longstocking), picturesque narratives drawn upon her childhood memories from a family farm (Emil or Noisy Village), or quite Narnian dramas of life and death (Mio my son, the Brothers Lionheart).

I also have a great many favourites of various epochs and styles, writing in English: Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, CS Lewis, JD Salinger, Anaïs Nin, Terry Pratchett.

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