Art
Literature
What to read
Do not waste time on trendy best-sellers. Life is short, and there are only so many books you can read.
Prefer classics over contemporary authors; they have endured the test of time.
A meta-aggregator of quality rankings like The Greatest Books is really useful.
I passed Nabokov's test for “good readers”.
Writing
Prerequisites for good writing, according to Steven Pinker:
- Spend an enormous amount of time consuming the good prose of others
- Adopt the right mindset, the right pretense
- Overcome the “curse of knowledge”
- Be coherent
Painting
Painters and illustrators I like:
- Realists:
- Ivan Kramskoi (gallery)
- Ivan Shishkin (gallery)
- Rosa Bonheur (gallery)
- Julio Romero de Torres (gallery)
- Edward Hopper (gallery)
- Antonio López (gallery)
- Richard Estes (gallery)
- Tom Blackwell (gallery)
- Diego Catalán (gallery)
- William-Adolphe Bouguereau (gallery)
- Roberto Ferri (gallery)
- Vicente Romero (gallery)
- Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau (gallery)
- Carol Marine (gallery)
- Alexei Butirskiy (gallery)
- Guillermo Muñoz Vera (gallery)
- Surrealists:
- Science-related:
- Illustrators:
- Other: