So basically I was unschooled, and the amount of books I’ve read in my life is embarrassingly low. It was never emforced like in a school, and with my family’s religious hangups, I never tried getting into new things because I never knew what would be deemed “offensive”.
But I’m always interested when I hear people talk about both storycraft and also literary criticism, so I want to take an earnest stab at getting into books.
No real criteria, I don’t know what I like so I can’t tell you what I’m looking for, other than it needs to be in English or have an English translation. Just wanna know what y’all think would make good or important reading.
ETA holy shit thanks for all the suggestions! Definitely gonna make a list
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen
Most things by Henry James
James Joyce has a good catalogue, I recommend treating a book like the Odyssey as a college course and reading prerequisite reading such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the original Odyssey (and it’s precursor the Iliad).
This should be a good years worth on its own!
im a piers anthoy fan and his incarnation of immortality series is his known magnus opa but the geodesy serries is the real one. foundation was isaac asimovs but he ends up sorta combining a bunch of his work into all one mega world. his ip is really undervalued. nine princes of amber for zelazny. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever for donaldson. river of the dancing gods is neat. oh there are many really
Ursula Le Guin’s the dispossessed is pretty impactfull. Very confronting anarchist utopia that is not a Paradise.
The lions of al rassan by guy gavriel Kay (worked on the silmarillion). A deeply melencholic fictional reflection on the reconquista of the Iberian peninsula.
The liveship traders by Robin Hobb has the best realised characters in fiction I’ve ever seen. Jaw dropping craft.
And finally, an entire shelf of book: The malazan book of the fallen. you will laugh, you will cry, and in the end you will love compassion.
Yeah you can’t go wrong with Ursula Le Guin IMO. I loved The Left Hand of Darkness too.
Also 'cause I love sharing it, her 2014 book award speech is worth a read as well:
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
I’ve heard that about The Dispossessed. I tried to listen to it on audiobook and the narration was terrible, so I just couldn’t get far into it. I need to pick up a physical or digital copy.
Oh, and Malazan is great. That one took me two tries to really get into as well, mostly because I initially had trouble keeping track of so many characters.
Won’t be taking very much of your time:
Kafka’s The Trial, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Machiavelli’s Prince, Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo
Just to avoid naming the very obvious ones.
Solid choices.
a few books that I found enjoyable recently
- Doors of Sleep
- The City and the Stars
- The Windup Girl
- Consider Phlebas
- A Scanner Darkly
- The Lifecycle of Software Objects
- The Mountain in the Sea
+1 for the whole Culture series of books. My personal favourite is Look to Windward but they’re all good.
Yeah, it’s a good series overall.
All of HP Lovecraft’s stories.
Lots of great suggestions involving story craft and the like, so I’ll target the “religious hangups” bit with a couple non-fiction books:
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Sentience by Nicholas Humphrey (great to get a perspective on consciousness and sentience that isn’t marred with religious doctrine)
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Determined by Robert Sapolsky (a primatologist with a knack for getting you comfortable with the notion that we don’t have as free a will as religion tells us)
And just to include a bit of fiction:
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Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (about life as we know it, or maybe as we don’t)
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Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (deals with overwritten cultures. Also dragons.)
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Soooooo many pretentious replies in this thread, they’re always the same.
Fuck that boring crap, start with good old light-hearted fiction.
Try -
The One Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out Of A Window And Disappeared
The Breach by Travis Lee
The Dublin Trilogy by Caimh McDonnell (all 5 of them, dear god they’re hilarious)
The Girl With All The Gifts
Invasion by DC Alden
A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (Anxious People is amazing too)
Wayward Pines by Blake Crouch (Recursion too)
The Idiots’ Club by Tony Moyle
And of course, The Internet Is A Playground by David Thorne
Waaaaaay more entertaining than all the classics mentioned, a very small selection of contemporary authors are vastly superior to the writers of yesteryear
Books are not meant to entertain. If you “realize” when you are over 30 that books are only for entertainment, then you are simply put, a lazy person.
Classics never outdate. They will forever remain as the must-reads for people who want to expand their knowledge and perception of the world because they come from a time where information was not as easily exchangeable as it was today. The only way to share ideas effectively and permanently was writing books.
You have no right to downlook on classics. Reading a classic book that has proven it’s value long ago will forever be more beneficial to a person than an author’s silly book that is written with the sole purpose of entertainment.
Reading 1984 WILL make a person clever.
Of course, you can always say some stuff like “damn who hurt you” and leave the discussion if you wish. Don’t make ignorant comments if you don’t know what you are speaking about.
Ha ha didn’t realise what instance I was on and forgot it was all 15yo edgy wankers
As you were mate
Of course, you can always say some stuff like “damn who hurt you” and leave the discussion if you wish.
Thanks for obeying! Much appreciated.
Enjoying a classic book is not pretentious. Conversely, gatekeeping what people think is a must-read is pretty pretentious.
Reading books which make you think is also not pretentious, and I get the idea that you sure think it is. There’s nothing wrong with light reading for fun, but some people enjoy more variety than that.
Discword series is really good. - very witty comedy with subtle commentary about real world
I wouldn’t say it’s must read but I can’t reccomend it highly enough: “Ascendance of a Bookworm” - an slow adventure about a girl struggling with an unknown disease in another world, and all she wants is to read books.
you can also hang out in !chat@literature.cafe and tell about your experience.
I’m not sure how subtle discworld really is 🤣
Godel, Escher, Bach
Infinite Jest
The Lord of the Rings
The Demon-Haunted World
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Slaughterhouse-Five
Small Gods
Master and Commanderand everything else written by those authors.
The first two or three on that list might take several fits and starts to get through, YMMV, but they are WELL worth the effort, and you will come out the other side changed by the experience. The others are all pretty easily digestible, but no less transformative.
Godel, Escher, Bach
Christ I know so many people who love this book, but I can never make it past the first few pages. Something about the giddy tone that the author uses to tell you exactly how you should feel at any given time just feels hard to stomach. Just present the facts and their connections in a concise manner, and let me feel my own sense of awe. Don’t rob me of my own excitement by trying to imprint yours onto mine.
The rest of the books, solid recommendations.
- Catch 22
- Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (series)
I don’t mean to be replying to every post on this thread–I guess I love a lot of books–, but I’m going to have to recommend these in particular for people who don’t usually read.
I had this friend in college who had never read a book of his own volition. He wasn’t the sort of person who was proud of the fact, he just thought books were boring and had trouble getting through them. This horrified me, as somebody who had a collection of some 500 books or so at that point (almost all of them read). Anyway, he read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and then Catch-22, and he was hooked. He’s been a reader ever since.
It’s YA but I suggest Hatchet because it’s the book I remember actually making an impression on me.
That is an excellent suggestion. I would also like to add Jack London’s To Build A Fire for a similar impact.
No idea what your reading level is, but here are some of the suggestions I’ve made to customers recently:
Harry Potter, if for no other reason than the cultural impact
Ender’s Game: children being taught to be elite military officers
Small Gods: satirizes religion, religious institutions, etc. If you ever want to read Discworld, this is a very good starting point
We Free Men: also Discworld, but YA-focused and about a girl who becomes a witch
Lamb, the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal: author imagines what Jesus and his BFF Biff were doing for those thirty years missing not recorded in the Bible.
Kindred: a woman starts to travel back in time to the pre-Civil War South. She can’t control it and she doesn’t know why. Probably Butler’s most accessible novel.
A Canticle for Leibowitz: humanity nuked itself back to the early medieval period and this one holy order watches it rebuild. It’s hard to describe this book in a satisfactory way without just summarizing it, but it’s one of my favorites and I’ve read it multiple times
The Giver: YA dystopian novel about a very structured society and the kid who is able to see through it. The sequels aren’t too bad either
The Hobbit: much easier to read than Lord of the Rings, but full of the same heroics plus dragons, dwarves and a clever hero
Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck. And probably Of Mice And Men.
Ben Franklin’s Autobio, Black Elk Speaks, Slaughterhouse Five
