I don't know any great foreign language books that haven't been translated yet, but there are some that are considered classics and which are now available in many different languages. One of the most famous and popular ones is probably Cien años de soledad, or One Hundred Years of Solitude as it is known in English, by Gabriel García Márquez. The book came out in the late sixties and covers the lives of the Buendía Family and their involvement with the town of Macondo. I haven't read the original, but the english translation does a good job with capturing the symbolism and metaphors that are rife in the story.

You are probably aware of Le Fantôme de l’Opéra by Gaston Leroux. This French novel was eventually translated to the much loved The Phantom of the Opera, which everyone should know. Then of course there is El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes that all of us in the English speaking world know as Don Quixote.

If there is one movie that completely embodies that movies can be so, so much better than their source material then it is The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola took what was basically a pulp fiction novel and turned it into one of the highest-grossing films of its time. For anyone not familiar with the book by Mario Puzo, try reading it after watching the movie and you'll understand. It's still about the Corleone family and the main plot is there, but so are pages and pages of useless subplots and side stories that should have been edited out. By the end of the book I knew way more about the personal issues of many of the characters, like Lucy, than I ever needed or wanted to. It didn't prevent the book from becoming a best-seller, but I'm grateful that the movie dropped all of the unnecessary stuff.

Plenty of authors have hobbies as you can't spend all your time writing. Most of these hobbies are quite ordinary, like Victor Hugo, the writer of Les Miserables, who also painted and Ernest Hemingway who wasn't averse to a spot of hunting and fishing. The authors with hobbies that I would consider slightly more unusual would be Sylvia Plath, who wrote The Bell Jar, and then decided to take up beekeeping, as well as H. G. Wells who wasn't ashamed to admit that he was a war gamer. Bear in mind, this is a hobby that is considered extremely geeky even in this day and age, so imagine the reaction that Wells got in his time for mucking about with clockwork trains and toy cannons.

I was actually surprised to discover that there are a bunch of planets out there that were named after famous authors. Everyone from Orwell and Dickens to Clarke, Asimov, Tolkien, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Lewis Carrol and even Jack London have their own planets. Granted, most of these planets are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things and there are so many of them out there, but still, imagine how awesome it would be to have an entire planet named after you. However, spare a thought for the authors who did not get an entire planet named after them, but only an impact crater somewhere on Mercury. Authors who have had this dubious honor include Rudyard Kipling, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Don't feel too bad for Kipling, though, as he has already got enough things on our own planet named after him. These include a lake, as well as two towns in the USA, named Rudyard and Kipling respectively. Apparently Kipling himself wrote a thank you note to the railroad general manager who named these towns after his famous author.

I wasn't allowed to play Dungeons & Dragons because everyone thought it was evil and satanic, but nobody monitored my reading too closely, so I was free to read gamebooks. These were the closest I could get to D&D and my favorite was the Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever. The covers for the books were a bit more tame compared to the Fighting Fantasy books, which often featured gory or evil looking covers if I remember correctly. The fun I had reading about Lone Wolf, the last of the Kai Lords, made me a lifelong fan of fantasy novels as well as an avoid role playing gamer. Dever released about 30 books in the series and I believe all of them are now available for free, so anyone can experience them in HTML form without having to spend a dime. A mobile game was also released about the character, but to me nothing will ever beat the original books.