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 
I'm gonna wait till I have a chunk of time to parse through these before I further fill out my backlog here
rec'd to me by this thread ↩︎
It's not YA but is very digestible to most age groups: the Discworld books. I'd say start with Guards, Guards! or Wyrd Sisters and proceed from there. The books aren't exactly chronological and jump between different characters in the same setting, but if you decide to follow the Guards or Witches arcs you'll be well set. There's also standalones, but generally the first two Discworld books are worth skipping since they're more prototypes of what the series would become. Pratchett has a really fantastic way of writing about human nature.
While I agree factually, they do a good job introducing the setting and many recurring characters. It's the rough sketch that later books fill in with greater details.
Agreed. They first two are rough compared to other entries, but they're still important.
I think Guards! Is most people's entry point. Discworld has several "series" within it that follow particulae groups of characters. There's the Ahnk Morpork guards, Death, Rincewind. You can probably find a guide online.
If I could put my finger on it, the first two books do the heavy lifting for worldbuilding. The vocabulary, like spinward, established in those books. It lets the other books breeze past these descriptions. However, you could also look this stuff up online these days for visuals and jargon.
spoiler
My favorite way to read the first two books is we, the Readers, are embodied in Twoflower's character. We're getting led around Discworld like a tourist by a wizard, treating his constant warnings about what's ahead like the words of a tour guide. We're laughing and going forward despite all the protesting of Rincewind just like Twoflower.
Pratchett also tends to lean on real world history and culture a lot - stuff like The Last Continent, where rincewind visits magical australia, is mostly just actual australian stuff, including the boat race in the dry riverbed. Offhand jokes - like an ornamental hermit in a garden, or tales of vampire watermelons - are often just pulled from real life or folklore. Even the main plot of Jingo, where an island rising out of the ocean starts a war only to sink again a few days later, is just a thing that happened, all the way down to a war being started that didn't resolve until after the island sank again.