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 ↩︎

  • an_actual_pigeon [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    1 month ago

    I can't recommend The Dispossessed enough. It radically changed my perspective on the world and helped me imagine what a different world could look like, really breaks you out of that "Capitalist Realism" mindset. It almost felt like Ursula was speaking directly to me. I felt like a better person after reading it.

    House of Leaves is also absolutely killer. Probably a big muse for the viral "Backrooms" and other "analog horror" content. It's a legitimately fun and exciting read that feels like you're really diving into something special, and the framing devices are so gnarly.

    A Canticle for Leibowitz is a great read, a major inspiration for the Fallout series if you're into that. Follows the rebuilding of humanity after a massive nuclear war in the 1960s, centering around a a small roadside abbey in the American southwest over the course of hundreds of years.

    I really enjoyed Alex Garland's The Beach, which might be better known for the 2000 film with DiCaprio. It's about a comfortably middle-class early 20s british guy who backpacks in Thailand and accidentally stumbles upon a secret and hidden "perfect paradise island" with a granola hippy commune of westerners living on it. It evolves into some cool social commentary and yknow, you see the dark underbelly of what's keeping this "paradise" afloat. It's a cliche, but I think the book had a better execution.

    Same thing with Fight Club and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Slightly dated but solid titles that have a lot to say about power, gender, sexuality, and finding purpose in the post-modern world. TGWTDT has some of the most engaging and page-turning characters I've ever seen in media, with the punk anarchist hacker Lisbeth Salander, and the rogue gumshoe journalist and cocksman of stockholm, Mikael Blomkvist. The whole series by Stieg Larsson is amazing if you haven't gotten around to it.

    I'd also recommend Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac". Really amazing meditative stuff in there. Imagine if Walden was written by someone actually competent and self-reliant. That book got me through some really rough times.