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 dystopic books that warn us of what we could be.
1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, Animal Farm, The Giver (and yes, you should still read The Giver even if you’re an adult if you’ve never read it before).
But the first book that flashed through my mind when I read the question was Slaughterhouse Five.
Ah yes, all those books whose plots are being used as manuals these days. :( lol
The Giver was really neat. Accessible too. The movie adaptation was such a bad idea because I thought one of its strengths was how it was set in an ambiguous time, iirc. The reader’s visuals seemed really important for that story.
While other books have made a larger personal impact, Piranesi is a wonderful, easy to read mystery novel with a charming, innocent protagonist that I wish I could read for the first time all over again.
It’s only a couple hundred pages as well, as opposed to the thousand page monsters many people love.
Seconding this book. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this decade.
Piranesi is a real gem, I ran across it last year and it was absolutely delightful.
I know! I love Piranesi as a character, the way he sees the world and justifies it is charming. Read it a few weeks ago and it hasn’t left my head, I hadn’t been so enthralled by a book since I was a kid.
It left a big impression on me as well, the world the way he sees it is so peaceful and tranquil, but then you start gradually realizing the horrific situation he’s actually in. And this contrast between the way the character perceives his circumstances and the reality of the situation is kind of haunting.
It’s really well-written, absolutely. Wish I could wipe it from my mind and read it again anew.
It is rare that you run a book that sucks you in the way Piranesi does.
For literature I find 100 years of Solitude to be without equal. An absolute joy to read.
For nonfiction I have learned so much from 1491. It was recommended to me by a friend though I have never heard of it elsewhere. The premise is that basically everything we think about Native Americans before Columbus arrived is wrong. I could go on but here is one tidbit: we tend to think of Native Americans as peoples without government. Now of course there are so many different groups of peoples all over the Americas and across so many eras it’s foolish to even think of them as being this way or that way because who and when are you referring to? But there were many types of government. In fact the Incas were total bureaucrats! Anyway I’m doing a poor job selling it i know but it’s a great read.
For self-help try How to Win Friends and Influence People. I know the title sounds like it’s a guide to manipulation but it’s really not. It’s 100 years old but still holds up so well. Times change, but people don’t, you know what I mean? People 100 years later still appreciate it when you remember their name and look them in the eye and make time to listen.
Hmm, considering your religious upbringing you might want to try some absurdist literature to break the mold.
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- The Cyberiad
- Discworld
- The Little Prince
These are accessible too, as you’re not used to reading yet.
I can also recommend subscribing to a monthly magazine and making a point to read it from cover to cover. That way your skills will improve. You can also buy a whole stack of old national geographics cheaply. This will expand your horizons.
- 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.
Fahrenheit 451 is certainly worth a read. I read it late in life, and could see immediately why it’s so often read in schools. Very well written, and a compelling story.
Another book that you may find quite personally compelling is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (Archive.org has a free audio book version), due to the themes it covers.
+1 for The Chrysalids … read it on English class in high school and loved it
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All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing are beautiful western novels by Cormac McCarthy. Both are very much “a boy and his horse” kind of stories about learning to be yourself. They’re loosely related and there’s a third book that brings the boys together and concludes their stories
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The Jungle and Oil! by Upton Sinclair are novelizations of Sinclair’s investigative journalism work in the meat packing industry and the nascent workers rights movement respectively. Oil! was very loosely adapted into the film There Will Be Blood (the film covers maybe the first 3-4 chapters by greatly expanding upon the material
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Hatchet by Gary Paulsen was a very impactful book for me as a child. It’s a YA novel, but still worth a read. The main character Brian survives a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness and is forced to find a way to survive on his own
A few more recent novels that I enjoyed:
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Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. Won the 2024 Booker Prize (best English language novel) about an authoritarian government taking power in Ireland and how that unfolds from the perspective of a mother with young children. It’s a hard read, but very well written
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Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez. Translated into English. A friend described it as “sexy witches in South America deal with authoritarian rule.” And that’s pretty close…
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Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park. A semi-fictionalized history of the Korean Peninsula and the desire to have a unified identity. Many people come to the peninsula (same bed) with very different goals for its use (different dreams). Really fascinating book and engaging
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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Follows a trio of friends as they explore the world of video game design. Starts in the early 80s and runs through the 2000s. Reminder me very much of the show Halt and Catch Fire.
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My Friends by Hisham Matar. Follows a Libyan immigrant living in England in the 80s through 2010s as he wrestles with his identity, his homeland, his friends and family. Khaled’s closest friends serve as foils to his own feelings, reacting to the same circumstances very differently from himself
Hatchet was such a powerful book when I was a kid. I bet it still holds up, so maybe I should reread it soon.
I’ve been thinking the same myself. I remember it having such an impact on me as a kid.
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As far as good storytelling, some of my favs are:
- The count of monte cristo
- The arabian nights
- 100 years of solitude
- The silmarillion
- A confederacy of dunces
- The three musketeers
I have a very long ranked list, but there’s a few.
I really loved The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. I was surprised at how well they held up over time.
Is the three musketeers really on par with the count? I’ve been meaning to read it for months but I always got the sense it would be disappointing.
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein is one the books I read during my formative years that I still think about a lot.
If you like graphic novels, The Sandman by Neil Gaiman is fantastic. Great writing and great artwork.
Funny. I absolutely hated Stranger in a Strange Land. It felt like a 14-year-old boy’s fantasy/im14andiamsmart. Pretentious and masturbatory.
Maybe I would have loved it if I read it when I was 14 instead of when I was something like 22.
It’s actually my go-to example for a book that I dislike. I think it’s the only book I’ve really actually hated. I would have just thought it was tripe if it hadn’t taken such a wonderful title away. Now there will never be a good book with that fantastic title.
Stranger has a point where you can feel in your body the whiplash of the change in tone. After the middle point Heinlein was blocked for years, and when he continued the result was grotesque.
When you start reading dialog about what happens in Heaven, when the story started as proper sf, you know that the author lost the plot (literally and figuratively).
I liked it until about half way through, it seemed to lose all the intrigue and then there was the weird bit about rape (if I remember correctly) at which point I gave up. Shame because it started well.
The Stranger by Albert Camus, Franny & Zooey by JD Salinger, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and the entire short story collection of Edgar Allan Poe
Wholeheartedly agree with The Stranger, but I think most people would not quite get it/appreciate its theme.
The best science fiction has to offer:
Metro 2033
Sphere
Jurassic Park
Roadside Picnic
Metamorphosis
Add from Stephen King:
Night Shift
4 Minutes to Midnight
(Both are novellas/story collections)
And also:
The Call of Cthulhu and other weird tales
I agree with more than one of these, but I would call out The Metamorphosis as one that everybody should read. You can appreciate it at any age (well, within reason–maybe not for the 8-year-olds), it’s dramatic and captivating, and it’s short.
I always try to recommend books of short stories to my friends who like to read but don’t have much time for it.
Your “best of sf” doesn’t include many recognized classics. That’s weird. No LeGuin, no Bester?
Michael Crichton in a list of “best sci-fi”? Really? He just does mass market pulp. It can be entertaining, in the same way a Transformers movie can, but it hardly qualifies as “best”.
How about some pre-transhuman solarpunk? I recommend my favorite book, Walkaway by Cory Doctorow. It’s about the birth pangs of a post scarcity society. Absolutely brilliant.
From a philosophy standpoint, Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. It’s a brutally tough read, but a very interesting perspective of a Holocaust survivor and some of the more “mundane” parts (which were still horrific) in between the parts most people know about. The philosophy that follows is interesting.
It’s certainly not without it’s faults and criticisms, though.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The best five-book trilogy you’ll ever read, even though there are six of them.
- Brave New World. After the Fact? The Truth About Fake News.
