What books do you consider must reads?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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.

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.

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.

• 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

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 Stranger by Albert Camus, Franny & Zooey by JD Salinger, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and the entire short story collection of Edgar Allan Poe

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.

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.

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.)

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

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

• Catch 22
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series)

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

Ben Franklin’s Autobio, Black Elk Speaks, Slaughterhouse Five

It’s YA but I suggest Hatchet because it’s the book I remember actually making an impression on me.

Recently, I really enjoyed the scholomance trilogy by Naomi Novik. Had anti capitalist themes and cool world building. main character can be a little polaraizing though, she can be "b wordy" for lack of a better less misogynistic term coming to mind, I've seen some talk about how much they hated her character and others how much they loved her (I personally loved her)

as an aside, https://annas-archive.org/ is your friend for getting books for free!

I also come from a religious family, which is why I say: For a fun read, please read Lamb, the Gospel According to Biff by Christopher Moore. Honestly, everything by Kurt Vonnegut, but if I have to pick, Harrison Bergeron is one of the best short stories I have ever read, and I carry Cat's Cradle in my heart.

Someone else suggested Catch-22, and I consider it a must read.

The Sun Also Rises is my favorite cock-and-bull story, but also, incredible for learning how to read critically. What I mean is, Hemingway is a 2 for 1 deal. There's the story that's written out, but when you read it again, you see everything he didn't say is a whole different story. Hemingway was a very deliberate writer, every word chosen for a reason, so when reading his work, it enhances the experience to ask yourself why he would choose to write that way.

But if you want some real good recommendations, I suggest finding a banned books list.

1984. Brave New World. After the Fact? The Truth About Fake News.

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.

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.

Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck. And probably Of Mice And Men.

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!

For nonfiction I would recommend books about media criticism and history. Manufacturing consent and The Jakarta Method, for example. These can help set you up for further reading. For media criticism, it will help you recognize when to keep reading about the people that journalists talk to and who they don't, why they are writing this article rather than that one, and identify others that take a media critical approach, as they are good people to read. For history, I think it is good to read widely and critically. We are not taught particularly thorough or accurate history in school. Much is left out or glossed over with selective narratives. For example, I was taught that the US Civil War was about states' rights, not slavery, because the text was from Texas and my teacher taught from the book. This was, of course, nonsense. A People's History of The United States is a pretty good way to start out if you want to start with US history. That might be better than The Jakarta Method, actually.

For fiction, it really depends on what you enjoy! What kinds of stories or topics do you find most interesting?

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

All of HP Lovecraft's stories.

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

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan. Kalki by Gore Vidal. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley. Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Atonement by Ian McEwan. Being Dead by Jim Crace.

If you've already read a lot of books, you should give If On A Winter's Night A Traveller a go.

out of position

The Brothers Lionheart, by Astrid Lindgren is one of my childhood favourites. Originally Swedish but has been translated into English.

The Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt another childhood fav., it has been translated from Dutch. Actually, anything by Dragt I loved, but not sure which have translations or not.

In terms of adult fiction, I was hooked on Stig Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series (he only wrote the first 3 though).

Someone mentioned Kurt Vonnegut; I recommend the one I've read of his: Slaughterhouse 5.

The Circle still gives me pause more than 5 years later. It's by Dave Eggers.

I’ve always struggled to find a good book to read. I love having books read to me, but to pick one up myself has always been a struggle.

So when I say I’ve love the Ascendance of a Bookworm series, know that this is one of maybe 2 or 3 series I actually read. It’s a fantasy story about one little girls dream of trying to read books in a world without books. The premise is silly on paper, but the world building and characters are so detailed and flushed out that I’ve gotten sucked in and read throughout the whole series multiple times.

The novels just finished the main series with Part 5 Volume 12, there an anime of good to mixed quality, and a manga too. Tips for new readers is to watch the anime before reading as Part 1 is not as smooth as the rest.

There is also a lemmy server for discussions !aoblightnovel@bookwormstory.social

Fifty Shades Of Grey

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