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 ↩︎

  • FnordPrefect [comrade/them, he/him]
    ·
    3 months ago

    Pretty much anything by Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle or Slaughterhouse 5 if I'd have to pick one) or Phillip K. Dick (maybe VALIS if I had to pick one)

    Catch-22 by Joseph Heller is really fun, and (regrettably) quite topical again

    Jerusalem by Alan Moore, the whole thing is cool but especially if you're thinking about reading James Joyce, there is a chapter written in the style of Finnegan's Wake

    The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, a bit of a nerd heavy story about the colonization of Mars