[Stewart]

Originally Posted by beer good

The Demons is a hilarious send-up of the politics of his day (and even more interesting considering what happened a few decades later).

The collector in me has this on the radar as a new translation has recently been published by Penguin Classics.

I've been meaning for a long time to read up on more of the classics. After Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, I really should try and get through more by Gogol and Pushkin as well, and Solzhenitsyn, Ageyev and Pasternak too.

Yes, me to. I've already decided that next year I am going to try and focus on Russian literature. (I should do better than my attempt at reading more Scandinavian literature this year.)

Having read and loved Lolita I keep meaning to read more Nabokov, but frankly... he scares me.

You could read Mary, it's nowhere near later Nabokov. But I'll post up my thoughts properly once I've finished it.

One contemporary writer I'm really curious about is Viktor Pelevin. I recently read The Helmet of Horror (his contribution to Canongate's myth project)...

I've skipped the Canongate Myths series, having been nonplussed by Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson's contributions to it. I'm interested in the forthcoming Michel Faber offering, The Fire Gospels though. But, on the subject of Pelevin I have a proof of his latest, The Sacred Book Of The Werewolf. Flicking through it I see references to Mel Gibson, Lolita, and The Matrix. Should be...interesting.

Also, a while back I read Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch and will probably get around to the two sequels at some point; it's not great fantasy, but it's got a different tone than his US/UK colleagues.

I was under the impression that the books were a tetralogy and that only in film would the Watch series - or whatever name is given to it - be a trilogy.