The most recommended Leo Tolstoy books

When I was in college, I told my writing teacher I wanted to write about my father’s death, which had happened when I was very little. My teacher, a famous writer, lost his father when he was very little too, but he told me he never wrote about it directly. I looked for examples in literature of someone writing autobiographically about a loss in early childhood and I only ever found one: Tolstoy’s debut novel, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. Tolstoy’s mother died when he was 2, his father when he was 8, and he writes about it with unparalleled power across his oeuvre, but never so directly and autobiographically as in Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. He made it OK for me to write my own autobiographical novel about childhood loss.

When a clearly enlightened spiritual master speaks to us, our first reaction is often resistance because the message is designed to end the reign of egocentricity and return us to Authentic Being. To me, everything Leo Tolstoy wrote in his maturity offers the same possibility, but none so starkly as My Religion. As with reading Mahatma Gandhi, we have the opportunity to witness the deep practice of an aspirant grappling with transcending the suffering of the human condition, in much the same way John of the Cross describes the “dark night of the soul.” It illustrates every person’s spiritual journey and the uncompromising nature of the path to awakening.

If you were to read one of Kundera’s novels, let it be this, Immortality! It’s the last of a trilogy (that includes The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness Of Being), and Kundera’s masterful attempt to answer questions such as: What’s the meaning of life? And is immortality so unbearable as our brief existence?

Its plot is Kunderian, light, and poetical. The story initiates from a simple gesture by Agnes, one of the protagonists, but as it progresses the reader begins to feel the heaviness of mortality and the endless challenges of love. It’s a beautiful discussion on the nature of one’s legacy, and how one changes (or not) through the passage of time, and unfortunately can’t do much about it.

Without having to query Google that serves up writers in a single file, this book is a delightful repository of the entire “who’s who” of literature, particularly of little-known factoids, served up as a rich smorgasbord that you want to devour without end. It proves that “the pen is the tongue of the mind,” even though “writing is a dog’s life,” and is a comfort to writers to know that others, more famous than them, have skirted the edges of penury, fame, and madness. You will also laugh a lot, in relief, I think.

Tolstoy describes and plays with religious experiences across various of his novels. He doesn’t take them for granted: the initial enthusiasm and prospect of personal change seldom leads to real transformation. Here, though, in one of his last writings, we follow the contagious spell of true conversion of heart. When a serial murderer meets a pure soul his self is transformed and goes on to change the life of others. 

Being a New Englander, I don’t care much about Southern literature but Wolfe transcends it and also influenced Jack Kerouac, who would be my sixth choice. It was recommended to me by Joe Fineman, son of novelist Irving Fineman, after I flunked out of Caltech (Joe didn’t), saying “This is your book.” I have no idea who my influences are but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that they thought Thomas Wolfe was one of them. He probably is. 

If you love to write, then this book will open up your thinking to different approaches in constructing a story of fiction.

The book was written by George Saunders, who is an accomplished author and a professor of writing at Syracuse University. He selected seven short stories from Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol and takes us through these narratives, asking questions about life, truth, and character.

As you are reading the stories, Mr. Saunders peppers you with questions that are aimed at eliciting what the story means to you, as well as shining a light on the technical aspects of storytelling.

I came away from this book being more reflective of any story or book I’m reading and learning some lessons about creating compelling fiction that I can apply to my own writing.

Reading this book was like getting a master class in fiction writing.

This is a riveting read for people (like me, maybe you) impatient with second-hand dogma, driven to search for what resonates as authentic. Here the famous author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina tells his own story: how even enormous creative success, wealth, family, and worldwide fame, could not prevent a midlife crisis. Tolstoy tells how he narrowly escaped his inclination toward suicide, then began to discover a spiritual dimension in his own life. After first resolving to rejoin the Orthodox Christian church, he rejected that option, “since I couldn’t believe all they said,” then engaged in his own—unconventional—process of spiritual discovery. 

Pierre Bezukhov is one of the most fascinating characters in all of literature. Pierre—the socially awkward, illegitimate son of Count Besukhov—inherits the family fortune but struggles to find his identity. He finds it, late in the novel, in an unlikely place. After saving the life of a French officer who has invaded his house to find shelter, Pierre attempts to assassinate Napoleon but is sent to prison.  

There, he meets Platon Karataev, a simple peasant, who shares his food with Pierre. Platon embodies everything Pierre has searched for all his life: generosity, integrity, and a keen understanding of human existence—giving Pierre a feeling that “the world that had been shattered was once more stirring in his soul with a new beauty and on new and unshakable foundations.”

This book is brimming with themes that are super meaningful to me—love, loss, healing, the nature of reality, time travel, spirituality, faith, and redemption. He does this through language that waxes poetic in a formal, archaic voice, dropping into and out of time, occasionally lapsing into a hilarious, modern tone. Laurus, the protagonist, reminds me of myself, a holy fool, who believes in the healing power of mercy and compassion. As well, he keeps one foot in this world and the other in a mystical realm to which he longs to return.   

There is no escaping that name when broaching the subject Graffiti. Banksy is the king. In Wall And Piece you get a broad study of his creations. You can leaf through and enjoy the pictures, but I highly recommend that you invest the time to read the witty and through-provoking text accompanying them. I am not saying that a comparison to Tolstoy immediately came to mind. All I am saying is that I continued to think about the book days and weeks after reading it.

Georgette Heyer is the queen of Regency romance. My mother gave me my first Heyer when I was about eight and I’ve loved her work ever since. Witty, beautifully written, romantic, glamorous, her books were the perfect introduction to historical romance. I’m currently in the middle of my fifth re-read of all her books and this time 'round, I think my favorite is Faro’s Daughter. This pairs the very rude and unromantic (but irresistible!) Max Ravenscar with clever, independent Deborah Grantham, a well-bred lady brought low by financial trouble who now runs her aunt’s gambling house. When Max sets out to rescue his beef-witted cousin from Deb’s clutches, the stage is set for a clash of titanic proportions. This book sparkles like good champagne, and it always makes me laugh.  

Although published posthumously in 2021, Silverview was substantially written, then set aside, some time before John le Carré died. His son Nick Cornwell (aka novelist Nick Harkaway), who edited the book for publication, speculates in an afterword that this was because its view of British Intelligence was more disenchanted than any of Le Carré’s previous novels.

I wonder whether there were two further reasons, one profound and one prosaic: that the novel is suffused with death and would therefore make an appropriately elegiac swansong, and that as his shortest novel in nearly 40 years, it would better bookend his 1961 debut, Call for the Dead.

Whatever the reason, it’s a classic Le Carré tale of loyalty and betrayal - and a book that will always be one of my favorite reads in any given year.

Using short stories, essays, and memoir selections from such authors as Poe, Tolstoy, Dorthey Parker, and Cheever, this book is an anthology of literature on addiction. Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat,” captures the madness that comes of alcoholism. Tolstoy’s essay offers sage advice about the nature of addiction. A lesser-known but standout story by Donna Steiner, “Sleeping with Alcohol,” teaches us what it’s like to be in love with an alcoholic and watching that person self-destruct. I’m a professor of English, and I used this book in a class I taught called “The Literature of Addiction,” alongside Dirk Hanson’s The Chemical Carousel as a primer for better understanding addiction before launching into stories, essays, and memoirs about it. The short stories in Under the Influence: The Literature of Addiction are entertaining as well as enlightening, and its other selections are just as informative as the books I previously mentioned.

In philosophy that focuses upon the meaning of life it is not long before one comes across the name of Joshua Seachris.

He wrote the introduction to this book and each of his fellow editors introduce their respective sections.

Thaddeus Metz introduces ‘Understanding the Question of Life’s Meaning’; John Cottingham introduces ‘What Does God have to do with the meaning of life?’; Garrett Thomson introduces ‘The Loss of Meaning in a World without God’; Erik J. Wielenberg introduces ‘Finding Meaning in a World without God’; and John Martin Fischer introduces ‘The Meaning of Life and the Way Life Ends: Death Futility and Hope’. 

Each section consists of about six different essays, from authors as diverse as Bertrand Russell, C.S. Lewis, and Leo Tolstoy.

"Like the Bible, In Search of Lost Time embodies its own sources, myths, and criticism. Like an archaeological site, the novel has come to stand for a state of civilization.” Roger Shattuck is masterful in reach and insight; his “field guide” is aptly named. The reader journeys alongside him to traverse the vast and incomparable terrain of a seven-volume novel. Full of wit and provocation, he leads us through thick and thin, and best of all, he allows our own reading of the great work to revive within us, illuminating the very experience of reading that Proust so brilliantly mined.

I mean, hello! The opening sentence “All happy families are alike…” is probably my favorite opening sentence of all time. This book is what I place in the “epic story telling” category for its breadth and scope of time. In many ways it is the story of two separate families and it hits on several themes I have come to crave and demand from art. Tolstoy looks at class, cultural and societal norms, and the emotional toll of familial expectations. It is a book so dense with interesting, flawed characters and it is one of the rare works I come back again to read every few years.  

There are many authors who attempt to capture the human experience of consciousness in words. Pioneers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner all pushed the bounds of literary convention to try to express the subjective stream of consciousness that all humans, presumably, revel in.

Nevertheless, I think the very best literary modeler of human consciousness adopted the same approach as the very best scientific modeler of human consciousness: instead of jumping in and examining consciousness with a microscope, he stepped back—way back—and chronicled everything that was going on all at once... and out of this beautiful turbulence emerged a clear-eyed vision of experience itself.

Tolstoy paints a tapestry that is shockingly cosmic in its vastness, while simultaneously zooming in for microscopic close-ups of the tiniest action—and then showing that it is the holistic interplay of all these levels of purpose and intention that gives rise to the marvel… show more.

When it comes to finding inspiration in our memories, Marcel Proust is literature’s gold standard. The French novelist devoted the balance of his life to the art of refracting his memories through the lens of his writerly self. Proust understood implicitly that our memories are triggered by sensory experiences—sights, sounds, smells, and touch, to be sure—but most especially through the pleasures of the text. In Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of his epic À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust interrogates the ways in which memory is catalyzed by the senses, while comprehending, at the same time, the manner in which the reality of our memories becomes shaped by the ruinous work of nostalgia, of a sentimentality that exists beyond our ken.

Shows the hidden writing techniques of well-known Russian authors and their placement of subtle clues—how they speak to the reader as a conversational equal.

In this way the reader feels welcomed, or initiated, into the creative process of different great writers such as Turgenev, Chekhov, and Tolstoy. This approach enhances the reader’s appreciation and understanding of six Russian classics that the book includes. As a writer myself, though not of fiction, this book had great educational value.