Onetime chess writer, tech support manager, editor. Lived in Moscow for a few years. Considered myself a hippie for quite a while, or, perhaps more accurately, a member of the Beat Generation. Hippies were more collective minded than I was, but I was late for the Beats.
Wow, what a question. Nietzsche.
Currently going thru Jane Austen after ignoring her for too long.
Henry James and Charles Dickens are other favorites. More currently, I liked Shantaram. I enjoyed John Updike’s Rabbit series. Saul Bellow was a favorite. I liked George Kennon’s Memoirs. Samuel Beckett’s Molloy trilogy. I keep returning to James Fenimore Cooper for some reason. I’m currently reading Addison and Steele’s The Spectator, from the 1700s. I’m addicted to Sue Grafton’s alphabet series of detective novels. I’ve subscribed to The Economist and Atlantic Monthly for years. I’m an audiobook fan; maybe my greatest listen was The Gulag Archipelago books, which I listened to in Moscow, often while walking past Lubyanka Prison in the snow.