Favorite books by illustrator Yana Frank

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The stories of the heroes of this Lifehacker column inspire you to pick up a new book, immerse yourself in the text and dream about your own library.

1. What are your favorite books?

Favorite books in different periods of life are different. For example, as a child, I sobbed over books, which now I am ashamed to even remember.

When I was 10, I read all Stendhal's soap operas. She cried over them with real tears. A little later, with a sinking heart, I read the complete works of Edgar Poe, although everyone said that I was too young for that and probably did not understand anything in what I had read. But out of all this, I grew up a long time ago.

Probably one of my favorite books forever - Donde mejor canta un pajaro (Where the bird sings best) by Alejandro Jodorowski. I have given the German and English versions of this book 20 times to different acquaintances.

This is an epic novel in two parts. Each begins with a family tree, and then, right along this tree, the author tells all the stories that flow into one another. This book is written in such a way that the very first page contains a bunch of promising lines. At the end of each paragraph, you light up from another story and start thinking: "Lord, how will this end?" A very emotional book. Straight from the first to the last line.

Well, and also "" Daniil Granin. She directly changed my life.

But in general, it's not fair. I have many favorite books. I have three more shelves of picture books I bought for illustration, and they are all my favorites. I buy only what I want to have and watch often. The rest has long been accustomed to taking in the library.

2. How did you develop the habit of going to the library? Don't like hoarding books or is it some kind of special ritual for you?

After our departure, a huge library remained in Dushanbe. She occupied all the free walls in all rooms, and the books were in 2-3 rows.

When we left, we left the apartment for relatives. And they could not get rid of our books, since second-hand booksellers did not take libraries of more than 2,000 books. Then they did not even want to take them for waste paper, since there was no container of this size.

In general, after moving to Germany, I became somehow more careful with books. I began to think more attentively which ones you really need to have at home. Berlin has absolutely amazing libraries, everything is there. You can keep up to 60 library books at home all the time.

There is an American library where simply indescribable treasures are kept for all designers, illustrators and so on. Take it and use it. There is a wonderful site: if a book is not in the nearest library, you can order it there, the book usually arrives the next day. All this costs 9 euros a year, but nothing for my retired mom. It is no longer necessary to have all the books at home.

3. Do you have a favorite writer? Which book do you recommend reading?

From the Russians - Tatiana Tolstaya. This is the kind of literature when you often read a sentence and then come back to read it again. And you think: "How could you write it so beautifully!" Admiring the text. I read for the aesthetic pleasure of reading. The content is also great, but I already know it by heart. And I still reread it to remember how you can write in Russian.

And also Pyotr Demianovich Uspensky and John Bennett. In general, I am very careful about any mystical literature, although the topic of spiritual development interests me very much. And in this area these two authors are closest to me. His scientific and generally human approach to such difficult issues.

And they are easy to read, they wrote in human language, which cannot be said about most mystics. For example, reading Gurdjieff is also interesting in places. But in some books he has one sentence - that's one page. You read how you fight!

My favorite English-speaking writer is Siri Hustvedt. I think she writes better than her husband Paul Auster. Although he is more famous. I dive into her books. It seems that you directly see the whole picture, imagine everything that happens, as if you are there.

And I really like her approach. I know her personally, I know some facts from her biography. It is interesting to read novels where there is a lot of personal (so alive, because she herself experienced it), but it is mixed with fictional elements.

Even knowing the author, you wonder which of this actually happened. And sometimes you think: “Oh, what if this very strange thing happened in reality? Happens!"

Most of all I love her book "The Invisible Woman". It seems to me that for many quivering creative women who are somehow looking for themselves and their place in life, she should be very close. And for those who are older - the book "Summer without men".

And by the way, going back to Alejandro Jodorowski, I don’t know Spanish and didn’t read it in the original. But it has been translated very well into German and English. I read all of his books that I got in both languages and every time I also experienced this pleasure from the text itself. He writes very thickly, no water at all. Each sentence is at least one act of great tragedy!

Of the German authors, I love Andreas Altmann. I also wanted to write about Paul Vaclavik, but he is Austrian, haha.

I have lived in Germany for almost 30 years, and I rarely come across books in Russian. I read all the time in German and English and I don't know which of these books have already been translated into Russian. Recently, I have been reading more books on self-development or scientific works, I have not much time for it.

Favorite now - Mindsight by Daniel Siegel. Mindsight is a therapeutic method for identifying and correcting various long-standing traumas that have stuck in the brain and affect our lives and behavior.

This is by far the main textbook with practical exercises that train the neuroplasticity of the brain. This book was originally called "The Alchemy of the Senses". In fact, this is a practical guide for the common man on how to apply all the latest research in this area to his brain.

And I also love all the books by Eda Burish (about how family and environment influence the formation of a child's personality). Paul Vaclavik's How to Become Unhappy. Das Ende der Megamaschine by Fabian Scheidler.

4. Which book from your childhood do you have the warmest memories?

If we talk specifically about fond memories from childhood, then these are the books of the illustrator Ida Bogatta. I myself grew up, became an illustrator and now I understand how difficult it is to draw like this “simple and uncomplicated”, but so that the illustrations are so warm and cute.

As a child, I just adored her books. Most of them are palm-sized. The stories there are very simple, they can probably be read to children without even knowing what is written there: everything is clear from the pictures. But these illustrations touch children to the core. I still have a lot of her books, my son and grandchildren grew up on them.

5. Which book inspired you to take action the most?

Granin "This Strange Life" is about the life of Lyubishchev, who wrote down everything he did with an accuracy of 15 minutes for more than 50 years without interruption. Inspired by this book, I myself began to keep time. As a result, I created my own system of organizing creative work, wrote a book about it "". Until now, I myself work on this system.

I was also helped once by the books of Barbara Sher. She understands the types of people well. I like its classification into "divers" and "scanners". Of course, I recognized myself as a typical scanner, and I was very much comforted at one time by her explanations that “we” are normal. It's nice to know that you are just a representative of some psychotype, and not a psycho. Although by the time of reading the book, I myself had already figured out how to live with it.

By the way, I also remembered Simonton's book "Return to Health". This book, of course, also changed my life. An oncologist handed it to me when it turned out that I had a relapse, and I was urgently written to the hospital the very next morning to remove ¾ of my liver (and before that I had completed a full course of chemotherapy and was officially “in remission” for a year).

I was there all day sobbing at the doctor (probably for the first time in my life I sobbed so much). And it seemed to me that I would not survive another round of such treatments at all. The despair was terrible. And so she gave me this book by Simonton, and I read it all night, and in the morning, in a much more optimistic mood, I came to the hospital.

I drew on it and fought, and then I made a big project that helps other people to fight. If you're interested, I have a lot about this on my site, everything under the name.

6. What book should each person read and why?

It's a difficult question. My son was born and raised in Germany, in fact his entire Russian language is what he learned in his family and thanks to his family's Russian-speaking friends. I once gave him books like 1984 to read with the words, "This is a book you need to know." He knows by heart all Pushkin's tales, he liked Gogol, I was happy when I discovered that he was reading Zoshchenko and he found it funny. The son read Chekhov, Turgenev.

Probably, for everyone who is reading this now, the above goes without saying. But when you live in another country and teach your child a language on your own, it turns out that you really consider it necessary to get hold of and let the child read.

For example, about "" we had a funny discussion. He said: "Well, mom, these are elementary problems, in all psychological blogs they have already been sorted up and down." Haha, okay. But all the same, it seems to me that you need to read it yourself in order to have your own opinion on this matter.

And for those who read everything for granted … I would suggest to look more often at books written by authors from very distant countries. In Germany, I often come across books by different authors from Africa, Indonesia, Mexico.

It's so interesting, they have a completely different picture of the world, often a different idea of happiness and norms. It is interesting to dive into other people's worlds, in general to remember that people do not always think the way we do. What seems wild to us is normal somewhere. And vice versa.

7. What good book have you read on the advice of another person?

I have two sources where unexpected books come from. This is my mother and my life partner Matthias. Both are very fond of reading and all the time they find books somewhere that I would not have found myself.

Matthias gave me Mindsight as a present, now I'm rereading it for the third time, it's interesting. He knows a lot of German and Austrian authors (he is an Austrian himself) that I had no idea about.

And my mother came to Germany at the age of 40, but she learned German so well that she does not get out of the library. She goes there several times a week, and she always has more than a dozen library books at home. She is interested in biographies of famous artists.

After reading about someone, she remembers who else was there in the immediate environment, then she finds their biographies too. Thus, a whole picture is formed about a large group of artists who lived at a certain time.

First, you read the biography of some famous master. Then separately - the biography of his mistress, who had been waiting for him all his life and whom he had broken all his life, from her perspective. Then - all the same from the point of view of his wife, friend, bitter rival.

Of all this, the most impressive is probably the autobiography of Bella Chagall. She also wrote that, according to her description, you can directly imagine every bridge and every street. But, as already mentioned, it is especially interesting to read such books together: after one such book, find the biographies of everyone else involved and read them too.

And the last funny thing that came to me from Matthias was Arnold Retzer's book Miese Stimmung. This is a book about not having to run around the world all the time in a state of euphoria. And that a person has the right to sadness, resentment and a little cove.

And I recently read a textbook on physiology with enthusiasm. On the advice of a friend. In general, I thought that I (for an ordinary person) know a lot about medical issues. But somewhere I wrote something not entirely correct, and a friend (doctor) advised me to read the corresponding passage in the textbook, which is a mandatory part of the program in all medical institutions. As a result, it turned out to be so interesting. It is a pity that I do not have time for everything, otherwise I would gladly read a number of such books.

By the way, to the question of unusual books: I recently grabbed onto a textbook on biology in the library, which is the "main one" here. It is American and, probably, in America it is also considered a classic of the genre. I don't know if it is in Russian. This is a great Campbell Biologie tutorial (Pearson Studium). How beautifully organized and illustrated this tutorial is! And as it is clear there are explained many things that I did not fully understand at school. Although she loved biology.

I had the feeling that now I would finally understand everything. The textbook is very thick and covers all major topics in biology. And it is organized in such a way that each chapter is divided into parts. And at the end of the chapter there is a questionnaire. If you still cannot answer a question intelligibly, it says which page you need to return to in order to work through this particular question again.

8. How do you read? What do you prefer: paper, electronic, audiobooks? Why?

I love paper books. Although lately I sometimes sigh that there is not enough full-text search. In an e-book, I would remember some key word and by it I would find this place and this passage immediately. And sometimes you rummage in a paper book for half an hour - well, where was that! But all the same, I often think that I am better at assimilating the text when I read something on paper. I know this is very old-fashioned. But I like.

In recent years, I began to lose my sight and underwent many operations to restore it. For the past three years, I have only been able to read paper books while sitting at a table with a huge magnifying glass. Literally a month ago, I had my sixth operation, and now I can read paper books again, lying in bed with reading glasses. This makes me very happy, I love to read that way.

When my eyes were really bad, I would open books on my tablet and turn on Siri so that she read them aloud. It's not that great, but it's better than not reading.

And in general, in bad times, I preferred to open books on a tablet and read there, simply because there you can conveniently enlarge the text to any size and move it around the screen.

9. Do you use special reading applications? Which ones?

No, I do not use it. Since for me in an e-book, the most important thing is to easily control the zoom and enlarged text. My favorite is to read regular PDFs.

10. Do you take notes, do you save quotes, do you write reviews?

Yes! In Germany I was taught that books can be just a working tool, you can just work with them. There are precious books, beautifully published, which do not want to be crumpled and spoiled.

But if I am interested in working with the text, especially if these are all sorts of books on self-development or business, scientific, I write in the margins, paste dozens of self-adhesive bookmarks into books, put pages with notes in some places.

I often buy used books online for a penny. It is psychologically easier to write and draw in them. And there I already "live life to the fullest": I circle interesting pieces of text, write something in the margins.

In general, I am in favor of working with books as conveniently. When I write books myself, I always encourage my readers to work with them. I often leave space for notes and notes in the layout.

11. List of the most favorite books by Yana Frank

I wrote a lot here. At the end I will just give you a list of your favorite books. The list, it seems to me, is very feminine. Maybe some of the readers will like it.

• Paul Oster - "Temple of the Moon".
• Siri Hustvedt - "The Invisible Woman", "Summer Without Men", "".
• Peter Stamm - "The Tender Indifference of the World."
• Sebastian Schlösser - Lieber Matz, Dein Papa hat 'ne Meise. Here, in letters to his son from a psychiatric hospital, a father perfectly describes all the details of manic-depressive disorder.
• Brigitte Schweiger - Fallen Lassen. Description of the world from the point of view of a woman living in severe depression. Her book - "Where in the sea salt" (Wie kommt das Salz ins Meer).
• Janice Galloway - The Trick is to Keep Breathing.
• Alejandro Jodorowski - Where the Bird Sings Best.
• Sean Tan - Tales from Outer Suburbia.
• Caroline Paul - Lost Cat. A touchingly illustrated story of a missing cat.

I also understand that this survey is about reading first. But about your favorite books too? Can I list my favorite books, which have more pictures than text?

• Tekkon Kinkreet ("Reinforced Concrete") is a stunning, lively, interesting comic strip about orphans living on the street in a Japanese city.
• Sean Tan - "". A book without a single word that any emigrant understands. His The Lost Thing is so touching.
• Casey at the Bat. Here you can lie down and die from just one thought: "Well, how could you draw such a thing." This will enchant any non-artist.
• Christian Lacroix - The Story of a Collection. Photos of the real diary in which he planned this collection!
• Torben Kuhlmann's books about the mouse: Armstrong, Lindbergh, Edison, Moletown. Cry with your child. They will certainly become your favorite books!
• Lynn Perelli's books. After them, you will immediately want to work out collages.
• Bob Dylan Scrapbook is a real scrapbook! In this book, a million of everything is glued, invested, laid out, taken out, and so on. Printed on various types of paper. Just like a real diary!
• Klaus Enzikat - Taipi. Maybe someone knows German, or maybe it has already been translated into Russian? In any case, there are immortal illustrations by Klaus Enzikat!
• Maya Angelou and Jean-Michel Basquiat - Life Doesn’t Frighten Me. One of my favorite writers has made a small book with my favorite artist about not being afraid of life!
• House Industries. This is just a catalog of the work of a design agency. But this is the coolest published catalog of all times and peoples!
• John Harris, Mark Todd - My Monster Notebook. A funny and coolly designed hoax book about mythological monsters.
• Drawn diaries of Frida Kahlo.
• Books by Matthias Adolfsson. You can look endlessly for both adults and children. Without words.
• Bastien Vives - "Taste of Chlorine". Love story in the pool.:-)
• Gillian Tamaki - "No Borders". A graphic novel for adults about life in a big (cynical) city.
• Aude Pico - Ideal Standard. A very voluminous comic strip for adults about finding a partner and great love. She has been drawing and writing this story for eight years!

In general, I got an interview about a bunch of picture books. But that's how I live, I'm an illustrator. I have a million favorite picture books!