Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

I have very fond memory of these books. We are from lower middle class family in India. My dad was fond of books. Western books were costly, but Soviet and Chinese books were of high quality and cheap. So we used to get loads of them from book fair.

A discussion on this happened recently here*:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739003

Someone (@rramadass) made me a good set of recommendations from the titles.

* Edit: I see now that linked comment too is from @clmul, the OP here. Thanks clmul!

Better link? https://archive.org/details/mir-titles

I loved these old books. I think I had the Seven Clam Sisters or something like it. My parents managed to rescue and bring to the US two childhood stories I really enjoyed: The Long Haired Maiden, and Shihan and the Snail[0].

These old folk tales are really entertaining. Often there’s no real moral or anything. It’s just a story. And to this day I really like these stories that are just “this happened and that person did that” and so on which don’t have to say “And the message is X”.

Unrelatedly, my wife jokes that I ended up marrying a Taiwanese woman because my childhood was spent reading folk tales about Chinese women.

0: both these are somewhere on archive.org e.g. https://archive.org/details/thelonghairedmaiden

Quick question.

What do soviets make great researchers? I noticed this pattern in ml, math & physics research.

Is it that they have better quality books?