Book is my best friend

For me books are my best friends because I can not imagine my life without reading. Books form my ideas and my character. I like to read both English and Russian novels. Sometimes, when I have some free time I read books in the original. When I want to have some rest I like to read Jack London's Alaskan stories such as "The White Silence," "Call of the Wild," and "Burning Daylight." They are unforgettable. Jack London knew the life of the North perfectly well. He met his characters in real life. He was familiar with their needs and troubles. One of Jack London's best stories is "White Fang." It is a story about the adventures of a wolf, who was tamed by the Indians as a sledge dog, and who little by little perceived the law of life: to eat or to be eaten. Eventually White Fang, but the name of the wolf as well, eventually understood, that love and kindness rule the world. I believe that Jack London loved animals a lot. He has written a lot about them.

But most of all I like to read Russian literature of the last half of the nineteenth century, the literature of the Age of Realism. The writers of the period payed great attention to realistic, detailed descriptions of everyday Russian life. Lev Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoevsky studied universal problems such as morality and the nature of life itself. Although Dostoevski was sometimes drawn into polemical satire, both writers kept the main body of their work above the dominant social and political preoccupations of the 1860s and 1870s. Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" and Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov" have endured as genuine classics because they drew the best from the Russian realistic heritage while focusing on broad human questions. Although Tolstoy continued to write into the twentieth century, he rejected his earlier style and never again reached the level of his greatest works.