Like the title! I've been getting back into reading for pleasure, and want to know what you like! I recently read Piranesi and loved it. I've heard good things about The Poppy War and Babel by R.F. Kuang, has anyone read them?
Generally just want a bunch of recommendations from your favorites, on our commie corner of the internet. No genre needed! 
You know, people give Herbert a lot of flack for his writing style, but upon rereading Dune I really grew to appreciate the prose. Every word feels very deliberately chosen, and I like how much attention is given to what characters are thinking about each other and manage perception of themselves (especially Paul).
Yeah, and it's especially critical in a story that involves a lot of manipulation and "plans within plans within plans".
I enjoyed it, but I like the Movie's changes to it a lot more because of certain... things... haha
I mention it in every book recommendation thread: 100 Years of Solitude
I just deleted a bunch of attempts to explain why it's so good. I think about it all the time even years after reading it, scenes and images from it pop into my head suddenly the way childhood memories do.
House of Leaves is my favorite book of all time. I think it's kind of a polarizing book, but I find it absolutely incredible.
I was going to recommend everything by China Mieville but this is a leftist website so I'm sure you've been recommended it a few hundred times by now lol
Instead I'm going to recommend James Ellroy. He's my problematic fave. The Los Angeles quartet is a must read, but if you're conspiracy brained like me, his Underworld USA trilogy is phenomenal.
I really enjoyed some parts of HoL but not others. Even though I wouldn't put it on my list I'm curious as to what you mean by "polarizing" in general bc I haven't engaged with any reviews or discussion around it besides me and my friend
Well, I don't have any sources for that one, but I've seen comparable amounts of people calling it brilliant or pretentious and gimmicky. I suppose it's that reaction - counter-reaction cycle that we always see with media that draws some kind of special attention to itself. Think Everything Everywhere All at Once, everybody loved it and then suddenly it was an overrated piece of crap.
ok, I understand. I am very careful with the word 'pretentious' because I'm not sure I caught that while reading.
spoiler
After reading many books of all types I appreciated how the author tried to do something different and use colors, patterns, fonts, etc to weave a mystery inside the mystery book. I was thrilled everytime the story jumped back to the actual exploration of the weird space inside the house, but about half-way through the book the writing was starting to grate. I wasn't impressed by the prose itself, but the story is still very interesting. I definitely didn't put all the puzzle pieces together but I must say it's really cool. If what I considered a "better writer" put that in a novel I'd be hooked. I simply wasn't motivated enough to turn it sideways and take notes, etc.
I like how HoL shits all over academia and I think that's why a lot of people get bothered by it. It's literary analysis and crit done seriously about a thing that doesn't actually exist. There's name dropping and commentary for a fictional piece of footage.
Literary crit has its place, I think the author was likely just sick of it after spending too much time among lit snobs. I feel that way about art sometimes. I'll wonder if Postmodernism was a mistake, especially since Marxism is Modernist.
I've been rereading @KurtVonnegut's works. Personal favorite is God Bless You, Mr.Rosewater. Great thing about Vonnegut is that you can just pour through 'em.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson is a must.
Also The Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs.
Thank you, I'm honored.
If you like easy reads, try my classics Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, and Galapagos. Breakfast of Champions is also fun, and it's where my profile pic comes from. If you want to get REALLY weird, try Slapstick, Jailbird, or my short story collection Welcome to the Money House.
So it goes.
Cat's Cradle is one of my favorite books.. I've read it multiple times which is rare for me
The wisdom of Bokonon can only be fully comprehended after much contemplation.
I got turned on to Becky Chambers last year and really enjoyed her stuff, both Wayfarers and the Monk and Robot series. Just recently read China Mieville's Bas Lag trilogy, that was really good. Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin was really good but touches on a lot of transphobic stuff, so could be triggering. Love Terry Pratchett, The Culture Series, and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. Oh, just read Butler's Kindred which was really good too. Less of a fan of Parable of the Talents. LeGuin is great too!
Edit: Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson is about a world in which John Brown won!
Thanks for the recs! I've had China Melville's stuff recommended to me to death, so he's been on my list for a while, same with LeGuin.
China was great. LeGuin has a kind of an old style so she's not for everyone but The Disposessed and Left Hand of Darkness are must reads. Her short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is only 4 pages but hits hard.
1984 ofc
Roadside picnic and The Road are definitely at the top. I am legend is so much better than the will smith movie genuinely brilliant story. His dark materials is a great series worth reading.
If you've ever seen the red dwarf TV series I'd recommend the books as they have a much darker more serious vibe but also hit a lot of the same comedy notes as the show. It also has a more satisfying storyline and payoff.
Once in those early years he’d wakened in a barren wood and lay listening to flocks of migratory birds overhead in that bitter dark. Their half muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl. He wished them godspeed till they were gone. He never heard them again.
Oh, will add those, thanks! Roadside Picnic is fantastic, I agree, I really loved it.
If you have a few hours try the STALKER movie, a loose adaptation of Roadside Picnic. It's one of the best movies.
I am legend is so much better than the will smith movie genuinely brilliant story
The main positive is that the movie is just one of those "trailing end of the zombie fad, what IP can we latch onto" types and has basically nothing in common, so it doesn't spoil the impact of the book.
I know it was a meme at one point, but This Is How You Lose the Time War was really good.
I came in to say Terry Pratchett, but since he's already here:
Jerusalem by Alan Moore is really cool (it has nothing to do with the middle east). I'm not sure how to sell it with a short blurb though. Maybe, an extremely well done "5th dimensional" novel...
The Illuminatus trilogy is fun if you don't mind a fair amount of CW stuff and otherwise irritating content
My favorite fiction book is also (what I consider to be) The Room (2003) of literary fiction.
Siegfried is a Adolph Hitler self-insert fanfiction written by globally acclaimed author Harry Mulisch (who is in fact a very talented novelist, let me be clear). It goes something like this: Rudolph "I'm totally not Harry Mulisch" Herter has got it made, hes the best writer ever, he just published the greatest thing ever written, hes got a hot, sexy wife, a smart son, and hes going on tour to talk about the greatest thing ever written, which is a book he made, because he is such a good writer. Though when you're the best, where do you go from there? "I know!" he proclaims on a big tv talk show "I will write a book attempting to process and fully understand the evil of Adolph Hitler! This is something no one has ever done before!" He is later approached by an elderly couple who is like "Yo hey we raised Hitlers secret son back in the day, AMA."
What follows is a bizarre, though interesting character study on Adolph fucking Hitler that plays with his humanity, contrasted with the inhumanity he perpetrated as the leader of the Nazi regime. However, this is interspersed with chapters set in the present time, which is all about the writing process and the musings of a man looking back on his life, career, and art. Those parts are straight up masturbatory and hard to get through. It's much like The Room in the sense that it's a story about its creator, the creators ego, and can be very cringy at times.
I don't know if I recommend it to anyone, and I admit that this is only one way to read it because it is also about the history of Europe in the 20th century and his own personal relationship with it as an artist and a writer, which is what the novel The Assault is about as well. However, if you strip that context away and read it as a piece of entertainment it is an absolute trip. This goes without saying but it is extremely liberal.
ending spoilers
Okay you know how in horror games there are little notes left around and they're basically like "I'm running from the monster and I'm hiding in this room. I am so scared. Oh no the monster got in and I am still writing for some reason. I am getting eaten aaaaaaaaaaa!" so that actually happens at the end but with the ghost of Adolph Hitler. I am not fucking kidding you.
CWs
CW: Nazi stuff, also dead kids, its been a hot minute since I read it so there may be some stuff im forgetting.
Infinite Jest: basically predicted the future, meticulous and descriptive writing style
The Hobbit: very short and sweet fantasy story. The LOTR series is on here too.
Magician by Raymond Feist: just bc my friend recommended to me and I consoomed all the books and teared up by the end. Average writing, entertaining and creative use of D&D inspired world building imo.
Dune: the only sci-fi book that has held my attention. Starts to get wackier and less-good as the series moves on imo. Or at least, the later novels don't keep me as entertained throughout as the first book does.
The Goldfinch is becoming a contender I'm about a third of the way through it. Incredibly sad and interesting story so far and it's very modern. People with iphone.
cormac mccarthy's unproduced screenplay about whales
i read Blood Meridian last year and have found it to be unforgettable. might be my favourite book.
Got halfway through years ago before life happened, will have to give it another go! Thanks!
I just finished it the other night and it somehow manage to exceed my already high expectations. It might have been the most violent piece of media I've consumed thus far, but I'm not sure. I grew up on black and white westerns where everything plays out nicely and the good guys never die. There are very few characters in BM I would even call good...
what i found striking about it was how human of a story it manages to be despite it all.
I agree. Some people take the message to be "People suck. Man sucks and is evil. The judge is just man incarnate so he sucks and is evil and thinks he owns the world." I think it cuts deeper than that in a way I might have to read the book again to say eloquently.
Mercedes Lackey. Her pacing kinda sucks, but after a while you get used to books that are 80% Slice-of-Life, followed by her rushing the plot into the last 50 or so pages. She likes torturing her OC's though, so CWs for some reads. Idk, Venus in Furs is one of my favorite reads. It's the origin of the term Masochism, and I held onto my rudimentary German for a while to maybe read more Sacher-Masoch. A rare guy for the time period, given his earnest fascination with the local Jewish diaspora. And the taste for rich, violent women of course.
I need to get back to Lackey. I read some of the Five Hundred Kingdoms when they came out, enjoyed them, but just didn't keep up with her work. A lot of that romance slop I only read if the people in my life asked me to download copies for them and I guess they stopped liking her.😅
I really wish I discovered that book when I was still discovering myself.
I remember genuinely enjoying Brian Jaques' Redwall book series to the point I'd recommend them even if they're considered 'children's books'. Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky is another favorite book of mine that still sticks out to me to this day, I never had a chance to read Vinge's other works sadly but that may be an interesting series to delve into. I'd also recommend John Steakley's Armor, though some might consider it a bit of a more mediocre title or even ill-fitting of the audience here.
its a shame I don't really have much more in terms of recommendations considering the quite literal thousands of books I've read in the decades where I read with seriousness. Honestly reflecting on it makes me sad. So much time spent relentlessly racing through pages, and almost none of it was spent reading any of the legendary classics of literature even when it was of the genres that I enjoyed. And none of it has stuck to my mind to this present day
Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is in the same universe (and shares Pham Nuwen) as Deepness. It's partially out of the Slow Zone where Deepness happened, and partially on a planet of Swarm Doggos, where each individual is the emergent result of four-to-six nonsapient dogs linked up through organic ultrasound organs.
The spiders are neat, but the dogs are really cool.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky is another good spider sci-fi book. Humans wipe themselves out, leaving our various hubristic experiments to survive and evolve over tens of thousands of years (megalomaniac scientist wanted to play god with smart monkeys, accidentally created smart spiders).
Wild. If it wasn't for my now milder arachnophobia, a result of showing the movie arachnophobia to a toddler, I'd be quite interested in reading the direction Adrian takes his story premise.
