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On mobile, too tired to write but… So many… But I honestly think Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is as close to the perfect book as I can imagine (for me!). Also, Kafka for me is like the Final Boss, once you go through him, everything else pales in comparison
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
It’s cliche I suppose, but 1984 by Orwell. It’s actually a fucking great read beyond it’s thematic meaning. People are correct in saying A Brave New World was more prescient, but it’s not as good a book in my opinion.
Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law series, all six mainline books and even the side books are all fantastic.
It’s manga, but Berserk by Kentaro Miura. IYKYK
I read Frankenstein in my highschool literature class way back, loved it then and love it now. Shelly was a pioneer.
My top 3, in order are:
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The Lord of the Rings
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Dune
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The Count of Monte Cristo
Great list!
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I loved the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. Read it as a kid and every time I go back to reread my beat up copies it is a joy.
- Philip K Dick - Galactic Pot-Healer
- Jose Donoso - The Obscene Bird of Night
- Alfred Kubin - The Other Side
- Ursula K Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven
- Stanislaw Lem - Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
- Boris & Arkady Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic
- H G Wells - When The Sleeper Wakes
- Stefan Wul - Oms en Serie
- Yevgeny Zamyatin - We
- Jerzy Zulawski - On The Silver Globe
I also really love all the Moomin & Oz books.
I like to hand out copies of WE to anyone who mentions 1984. I get chills when discussing it sometimes.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It’s the first in a trilogy of six books. I haven’t read the last book but I would recommend reading 1 to 5.
The radio series and audiobooks are all worth a listen as well. There is a version narrated by Douglas Adams himself and another narrated by Stephen Fry and Martin Freeman. Both are great.
One of my favourite quotes from the Hitchhikers:
“You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.” “Why, what did she tell you?” “I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”
I also love this quote from the fourth instalment of the series So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish:
The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying “And another thing…” twenty minutes after admitting he’s lost the argument.
The whole series is worth a read. You’re bound to laugh over and over reading them.
So, for me, the cliche answer is Lord of the Rings. But another book that I’ve always really loved, is East by Edith Pattou. It’s a very simple fantasy story, but I read it when I was much younger and it’s always just felt very comfy and cozy whenever I read it.
I’m putting east on my TBR list! Thank you for sharing!
I really hope you’ll enjoy it! The sequel, West is also good, though a bit weaker than East. I don’t often reread books, just because I would rather spend my reading time with a book I haven’ yet read, but East is one of the few books I’ve made an exception for; I must have read that book four or five times by now.
In no particular order:
The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud
Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong
Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu
The Red Night Trilogy of William S. Burroughs (Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, The Western Lands)
On the Road: The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac
Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCainRomance of the Three Kingdoms and Please Kill Me rank high for me too. I remember the first time I heard Blank Generation: I couldn’t listen to anything else for weeks. Just that album, over and over…
Are you familiar with Kharms?
Blank Generation is a special album for me too! Richard Hell is a genuinely foundational artist for my musical tastes, along with much of his NYC cohort. You know Blank Generation is going to be remarkable right out of the gate when you hear Hell wailing “Love comes in spurts! Oh, god… it hurts!”
I’m not familiar with Kharms, but a cursory search tells me that he checks a lot of boxes for what I like. Do you have any recommendations as to where I should start with him?
He wrote very short stories, so there’s a complete collection available.
Excellent—thank you for the recommendation!
Far too many to list but some of my favourites are -
The Belgariad series by David Eddings
The Magician series by Raymond E Feist
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
Pretty much anything written by Dan Abnett, Terry Pratchett and R.A. SalvatoreLove all of those with the exception of Bernieres, gonna need to check them out
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin surprised me. It’s such a bittersweet and emotional book. It hooked me right from the start.
a few of importance to me:
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Guards! Guards!
Piranesi
The Scar
The Wooden Sea (Crane’s View, #3) by Jonathan Carroll
- I suggest jumping into this novel blind and do not ask questions, just go with the flow
Dragonriders of Pern Series by Anne McCaffrey
- Self explanatory
Oh man. “All time” is hard because I’ve been through so many phases of my life. I count a favorite as any book I’ve bought, since I’m usually such a library person.
Tween/teen:
- The belgariad
- Harry Potter
- Anything by tamora Pierce (Alana, the circle)
- Enders game
- Name of the wind (still waiting for doors of stone, damn you Patrick)
- Wrinkle in time
- The giver
college:
- Hyperion
- Dune
- Mists of Avalon
Now:
- The housekeeper and the professor
- The house on the cerulean sea
- Stories of your life and others
- Shit Cassandra saw
- The last graduate series
- A Court of Thorns and Roses series (it’s a guilty pleasure and I’m ashamed to post it in the same thread as these classics but I’m addicted right now)
The belgariad was great when I was a kid, reading about the author was wild though. Don’t if you don’t want to taint the image.
I’m depressed enough knowing what I know about JK Rowling and Orson Scott Card…
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance can be a difficult read at times, but is honestly incredible.
If you like having things to ponder and think on, it’s unforgettable
I was assigned Zen in college. I could not get into it. And I had to get it read. I took it chapter by chapter backwards and loved it.
I listened to it on Audiobook myself; i think it’s very suited to the format
Lord of the Rings just about saved my life in high school. Possession by A.S. Byatt. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, though I’ve yet to read the sequels. Atonement by Ian McEwan. Just about anything by Geoff Ryman, Ali Smith, José Saramago, or Sheri Holman.
Your taste seems like exactly the sort of thing I’d enjoy, do you have any specific suggestions for someone who absolutely loves Eco’s metafictional novels in particular and metafiction in general? (Aside from Possession, which I’ve never heard of but is going directly on my to-read list)
I recently read How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu, which I really liked. It is science fictional, though, but maybe not…maybe more surreal. Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, David Markson. I started Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić many years ago, got interrupted, and haven’t got back to it, but I definitely need to because it was so intriguing in form.
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