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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.
Hmm, considering your religious upbringing you might want to try some absurdist literature to break the mold.
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.
Oh yes definitely The Little Prince is a must-read.
As far as good storytelling, some of my favs are:
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.
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.
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.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The best five-book trilogy you'll ever read, even though there are six of them.
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.
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 🤣
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
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
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:
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
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…
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Your "best of sf" doesn't include many recognized classics. That's weird. No LeGuin, no Bester?
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.
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.
Lots of great suggestions involving story craft and the like, so I'll target the "religious hangups" bit with a couple non-fiction books:
Sentience by Nicholas Humphrey (great to get a perspective on consciousness and sentience that isn't marred with religious doctrine)
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:
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (about life as we know it, or maybe as we don't)
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (deals with overwritten cultures. Also dragons.)
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
Edit - downvoted by the wanks that think reading George Orwell makes them clever lmao. Once you get over 30 you realise that books are for entertaining, not to leave on your coffee table to try to seem interesting
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.
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.
lmao.
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.
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
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.
Especially if you're new to reading, the books worth reading are the ones you enjoy reading.
Like anything else reading is a skill and you get better at it the more you do it. There's a reason we don't start kindergarteners on Tolstoy and Shakespeare.
There are great suggestions in this thread so I'm not going to suggest any more. But I'd recommend to start every new book with an open mind, but if you're not "feeling it" by page 10 or 20 it's 100% okay to put it down and try a different one.
You can always come back to it later. Or not. There are more "must read" books than can ever be read in a lifetime. Find the ones you enjoy and which make an impact on you.
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 Commander
and 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.
I'd happily recommend anything by Brandon Sanderson, I generally find everything he writes to be an easy read.
Also, get an account at your local library, it's much easier/cheaper to fly through books that way. Tip: if your library sucks, many libraries will accept you as local if you work in the town. (I belong to two library systems this way)
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.
I can never stop recommending The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.
Its some of the most beautiful, cozy writing I've ever had the pleasure of reading, all wrapped in queer and race allegory and science fiction splendour.
Please read it.
I'm reading that right now and it's fantastic! I was reading a horror series that just got too bleek, a friend recommended The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet and I'm really enjoying it. I'm a slow reader so it takes me a while to get through a book but I'm definitely going to finish this one.
It’s YA but I suggest Hatchet because it’s the book I remember actually making an impression on me.
Ben Franklin’s Autobio, Black Elk Speaks, Slaughterhouse Five
It is always hard to pick just one, but I usually pick either one of the culture novels, or Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder.
It depends on what you are looking for.
Look at the classics, some can be a bit heavy. But there is generally a reason they are considered classic stories.