originally posted in the megathread but want to make this a more active plea.

seeing the current 'YA good classics boring' discourse on the timeline is making me negatively polarized into finally sitting down and locking in. a lot of people are unread and proud at the moment and I'm embarrassed to be in the same general set as them. I'm a manga/LN/WN/fanfic-head, I used to be an avid reader as a pre-tween (like, 6-8) but all I really remember out of my childhood escapades is Hitchhiker's Guide and fucking Hatchet, and then I got the 'lazy student sparknotes' bug in middle school, and now my primary engagement with reading is stuff published by others online (homestuck (regrettably), parahumans, perusing mangadex and ao3, etc.)

please share your recommendations, I'm grabbing what I know but I want to broaden my horizons here. doesn't have to be the classics exactly, just, like, serious (don't know how else to describe it). I'm not trying to be elitist, really just want to be better read.

current backlog thus far obtained purely through osmosis, very little prior interaction:

  • Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
  • Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
  • Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
  • Three-Body Problem – Liu Cixin
  • House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
  • White Noise – Don Delillo
  • American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
  • Dune – Frank Herbert
  • Ulysses – James Joyce
  • The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin
  • One-Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez[1]
  • Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
  • The City and The City – China Miéville
  • October – China Miéville

edit: that's a lot of recs! keep em coming, I very much appreciate it lea-happy
I'm gonna wait till I have a chunk of time to parse through these before I further fill out my backlog here

  1. rec'd to me by this thread ↩︎

  • hypercracker
    ·
    3 months ago

    That's a great list you already have, I would second The Three Body Problem, The Dispossessed, Blood Meridian, and both books by Miéville. I also loved Iron Council by him.

    Looking through the fiction I've read over the past few years and enjoyed, I would pick out:

    • The Southern Reach Trilogy (aka the Annihilation series): truly just unbelievably good cosmic horror with a lot of iconic passages. Annihilation beat out the second book of the Three Body trilogy for the Hugo award when it came out, and honestly it's deserved.
    • A Memory Called Empire: This one won the Hugo award recently, it's like a sci-fi imperial court drama following an ambassador from a culture that records & implants memories into each successive generation to benefit from accumulated life experience.
    • Babel: honestly this is verging on YA but it's good enough to include. It is like anticolonial harry potter basically.
    • Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands: a graphic novel by Kate Beaton, the Hark! A Vagrant webcomic artist. Includes some SA content.
    • The Ministry for the Future: if you want some climate doomerism but also some climate hope. A bit lib at times but accurately captures the scale of the problem.
    • Piranesi: second book by the woman who wrote Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a very memorable & imaginative. About a person living in an alternate dimension of infinite halls filled with marble statues, also with its own tides and ecosystem.
    • The Player of Games - literally the only Culture Series novel worth reading, fight me
    • Diaspora - a great introduction to Greg Egan if you haven't read him before. His most popular book is probably Permutation City but it's a bit rough to get into. This book is the only one I've read that competes with The Three Body series in terms of scale of vision.
    • The Left Hand of Darkness - The eternal debate over which UKLG book is better, this or The Dispossessed.