Need to get back into reading. Usually read horror literature and Russian works. But regardless, tell me your favorites !
I had taken a pretty long break from reading for leisure. I read Lord of the Rings in high school and was convinced I’d never find something that enjoyable ever again.
Then I read Dune and it really got me back into reading again. I also tackled the Mistborn trilogy and then the Stormlight Archive shortly after. There are also some other books by this same author that I picked up, such as Warbreaker.
Then I read the first 3 of the Red Rising books (I am waiting for the author to finish the series before I continue).
Then Dungeon Crawler Carl, and am now working my way through Wheel of Time.
Some of this was fueled by me swapping out my time I spent on Reddit to reading books and a lot of it was just enjoying books once I actually picked them up again.
All this to say…
Try Dune! If it feels confusing at first, just keep reading.
Or you can go into a more YA/easy read of Mistborn. Which is basically medieval fantasy. Think French Revolution era but with magic.
“Revelation Space” from Alastair Reynolds: a very solid hard science fiction space opera.
“Neuromancer” from William Gibson: the seminal cyberpunk novel where the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
“Destination: Void” from Frank Herbert: starts inside a space ship, a bit dark.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. It will make you laugh and cry… At the same time. A brilliant anti-war book.
It’s very similar to Vonneguts, Slaughterhouse 5.
An excellent non-fiction book, that Catch-22. Required reading for anyone working in a corporation. Or anywhere really…
Two favorites that I reread several times in my teens/twenties/thirties that I was recently thinking about:
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“Geek Love” by Katherine Dunn
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“At the sign of the naked waiter” by Amy Herrick
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Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick
floowed by
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
I’m not an avid reader (anymore) and can’t even tell you any favorites. But since you’ve mentioned liking horror and Russian authors: are you aware of Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch series?
I guess it’s more fantasy than horror, and probably not like any of the Russian literature classics, but I just figured you might enjoy it.
- Ada, or Ardor, Nabokov.
- The Dispossessed, Le Guin.
- A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace, Martine.
Anything by Le Guin is soo good! Dispossessed is a particularly good one though. I read Lathe of Heaven earlier this year, and that was a fun ride.
The Children of the Dead by Elfriede Jelinek is my number one. Second place is a tie between Women and Men by Joseph McElroy and The Tunnel by William H. Gass.
Whoa haven’t heard of any of these before, thanks for the fine literary recs.
If you like horror/psychological stuff, I recommend House of Leaves. It’s kind of a gimmicky book in that its style changes a lot and the story is all over the place (literally), but I kind of enjoy how it feels like you’re skimming and ripping out newspaper clippings like a madman and stapling them to the diary of a semi-deranged burnout drug addict with actual brain damage.
Certainly an experience.
I’ve just starting getting into a bit of russian/eastern europe scifi. “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin is incredible if you haven’t read it. It is clearly the main inspiration for 1984, but just so much better. Then, just about any book by Stanislaw Lem is great. Solaris is probably the easiest to find and a pretty good more hard-ish sci-fi book, but I gotta recommend “Futurological Congress”. It’s hilarious! Reads like a Douglas Adams book, with an interesting idea at its core. So I think those are my most recent “favorite” books for the moment.
I can’t help but be that annoying type of person who, when someone brings up 1984, has to immediately tell them about “We” and that Orwell was kind of cringe lol
Project Hail Mary is my go to recommendation.
Came here to say this. Only book I’ve finished and immediately read again. The audiobook is even better.
One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, long read, but probably one of the best books written.
Today, I would say Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. I don’t really do hard rankings, though. Tomorrow it might be Pride & Prejudice or Persuasion.
Either way, y’all, do yourselves a favour and at least try Jane Austen once. She’s often put in a corner with corny romance novels but I mostly love them, because she’s snarky as hell and her characterizations are astonishingly timeless. Sure, there is romance in the novels and I definitely enjoy it, but maybe the following quotes taken from some final chapters give you an indication of the general tone:
*** and *** were married, the bells rang and everybody smiled
The wedding was very much like other weddings, where the parties have no taste for finery or parade.
Who can be in doubt of what followed? When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, ever so imprudent or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other’s ultimate comfort.
Of all time, a single book that’s not part of a series, I still gotta go with Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein), or Cat’s Cradle (Vonnegut)
Salman Rushdie writes great novels.
Since douglas adams was mentioned a few times, I also highly recommend anything by P.G. Wodehouse if british humor is something you want to get into…
I’m currently re-reading Jostein Gaarder with my kids, also a great read I think.
