... made a strong impression on me as a child

Since he first burst onto the world chess scene in 1992, displaying a maturity of play far beyond his sixteen years, Vladimir Kramnik has been tipped as a future World Champion. Still only in his mid-twenties he has won numerous tournaments in many countries, and is one of the very few players regularly to hold his own with Kasparov. This book, Kramnik's first, describes his life and chess career, beginning with his unusual childhood. It features more than 50 of his best games, deeply annotated, plus numerous additional games and game extracts, including some from quickplay and blindfold events.

... close race between several Donald Duck comics (seriously).

Donald Duck, a cartoon character created by the Walt Disney Company, is today the star of dozens of comic-book and comic-strip stories published each month (in certain parts of the world, each week) around the world.

And your favourite book? I honestly don't read that much. Obviously I read chess books – in terms of favourites, Kasparov's My Great Predecessors' is pretty good.

My Great Predecessors is a series of chess books written by World Champion Garry Kasparov. The five volumes in the My Great Predecessors series are about the players who preceded Kasparov in being official World Champions. The series of books continued with the Modern Chess volumes that covers developments in the 1970s and Kasparov's games with Anatoly Karpov. The series is being extended with three volumes of Garry Kasparov on Garry Kasparov, covering his other games. The books contain some historical details, but for the most part the books are made up of annotated games.