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 ↩︎

  • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
    ·
    1 month ago

    Re: Ulysses, this is Joyce at his more experimental (Finnegan's Wake being his most experimental); you might appreciate it more if you start with something earlier like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

    As someone who did start Joyce with Ulysses, I would add as my advice that the best way to read Ulysses is just to read Ulysses, if something about the text chafes or feels like an obstacle on a first read, it's probably easier to just plow through that bit and then get into the academics afterwards to get a better picture of the specific questions that come up.

    • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]
      ·
      1 month ago

      Fair enough, my intro to Joyce was by way of Beckett, so I took the long way around.

    • Sausage
      ·
      1 month ago

      Dubliners is great as well