Need to get back into reading. Usually read horror literature and Russian works. But regardless, tell me your favorites !
I really loved The Locked Tomb series, it’s brilliantly written and does a good job leaving you as confused as the characters while also being aimed perfectly at my demographic.
Huge fan of Ursula K. LeGuinn’s The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. They’re great sci fi explorations of politics and gender
My wife and I are both fans of Brandon Sanderson’s work, very good for anyone interested in getting into fantasy (also popular for learning to read books in English).
When Women Were Dragons is a feminist fantasy novel that made me cry on behalf of the older women in my life and was just a really powerful book
I have more queer lit I can recommend, but it’s probably not going to be what I’d describe as my favorite.
For nonfiction The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow is a fascinating book that left me feeling like we are capable of building a better society
Anna Karenina
Everyone needs to read it once in their lives. It’s the best love story ever written IMHO
Barring that, people read any Russian classic. Their literature just hits different. Say what you want about the government, but the people are so beautiful in their complexity.
I can’t name a favorite but I’m reading an interesting one now which is Wittgensteins Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. You really have to think about what he’s trying to explain.
I loved Seven Eves as a whole, but the novella AR the end drops in quality significantly imo. Still very worth the read.
The Silmarillion has endured since my early teens. I’ve read it closer to ten times in the past 20 years.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is about the horrors (and occassionally the beauty) of being an outcast in modern-day Delhi. Another of Roy’s works is The Briefing, a short story in the form of a speech given by a guerilla leader to their followers as they are about to attack a fortress in the Alps.
The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin.
Few other sci-fi books do as good a job of depicting how a gift/library economy could work like in practice. It’s quite a hopeful vision of where we can collectively go in the future.
Anything by Le Guin is amazing. Have you read Left Hand of the Darkness? It explores themes of gender identity. It’s my favorite of hers. The Word for World is Forest is also really good
I need to read The Word for World is Forest at some point. I’ve read the rest of the Hainish Cycle novels. Rocannon’s World was pretty good, a nice exploration of setting but otherwise couldn’t compare to Left Hand or Dispossessed, Planet of Exile was uncomfortably Pocahontas, but set up for City of Illusions which was really good, just not a “everyone should read it” like Left Hand and Dispossessed.
Definitely a Discworld book, but hard to narrow down which exact one.
Night Watch should take it, but to get the most you have to read the 4 or 5 books before it in the guards series. It works on its own, but a lot of the flavour will go over your head.
After that is a toss-up between Reaper Man and Small Gods.
Reaper Man - Death “loses his job” and becomes mortal for a few weeks and becomes a farmhand.
Small Gods - A God comes down to Earth to stomp around and inspire fear, but the church no longer believes in him anymore, just the power structure within the church, so he doesn’t actually have any power and ends up stuck as a Turtle, only able to talk to the one guy who believes in him.
The whole of discworld is so good, I highly recommend everyone at least try it
In the guards series: The 5th elephant.
In the witches series: very hard to pick. Granny is my favourite.
I love all of the books except for the first two, he really hadn’t settled down as a writer yet.
I love all of the books in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe and it’s definitely my number 1. Mistborn, Stormlight Archive, Warbreaker, Elantris, all of them. I think it’s worth looking into reading order. It doesn’t matter too much in the earlier books, but there are some references that add to the experience. In the latest books, there are things that need to be understood from other books for it all to make sense, particularly between Mistborn and Stormlight.
Other series I really enjoy:
- Robin Hobb: Realm of the Elderlings anthology.
- Jim Butcher: The Dresden Files.
- Brian Mcclellan: Powder Mage series.
- Joe Abercrombie: The First Law series.
- James Islington: The Licanius trilogy.
- Robert Jordan: The Wheel of Time. This is what got me into Sanderson since he finished the series
Unfinished series:
- Scott Lynch: Gentleman Bastards.
- Patrick Rothfuss: The King Killer Chronicles
I love Sanderson, his books have great settings and magic systems, his female characters are well written, and he actually puts out books and finishes series
I read both mistborn and a large part of the stormlight series, though the latter I never finished because books were still coming out at the time. The first Mistborn book is great and can in my opinion even be read standalone if you don’t want to commit to a whole series. I also just finished Yumi and the Nightmare painter which I found pretty good. I wished Sanderson would put out a second book to the Rithmatist
Gentleman Bastards and the First Law Series are two more series that I’ve had on my readlist for quite some time now. Kingkiller chronicles I remember also finding pretty good back when I read it, though I am a bit miffed that it still isn’t a finished series.
The Licaniud Trilogy is the one with the book “The will of the many”? If so that’s anothet series on my readlist. I am starting to think we have a pretty similar taste in books ;D
Brandon Sanderson is a genius, and I read through the entire cosmere in a little over a year after not reading a whole lot for years.
As for reading order, it doesn’t matter quite as much as people sometimes say. There are two standalones that don’t really work as a starting point (Sunlit Man and Isles of the Emberdark), but the rest works great. You can even start with Stormlight Archive if the sheer size of the books doesn’t scare you off.I’ve been reading his work.
Mistborn, Warbreaker and some short novellas in between. Now I’m halfway into The Way of Kings and loving it. Saving your comment for possible future reference!
I love Sanderson’s writing style. The way he builds up the characters and environment is unparalleled imo. That and the vastness and variability of his magic systems really keeps everything fresh. There are a couple non Cosmere or at least not intertwined novels that are great too. During the pandemic he wrote 4 books in one year. Absolutely insane. Yumi and the Nightmare painter was maybe my favorite of them, but I’d recommend all of them.
I’m gone through his YA work with Janci Patterson, and it’s good, but too juvenile for me.
The other authors and books I listed I was chasing Sanderson like work. None of them are quite there but I know that hes praised at least the powder mage series.
Another one I forgot to like was Brent Weeks: Lightbringer Saga. I want to say Brent was a student of Brandon’s. The magic system feels like something he would write, but the writing isn’t quite as mature. It was still a good series and worth a read.
I’ve read “Player of games” by Iain M. Banks so many times I broke it and had to buy a second copy.
That book is so good!
Anything by Emma St John Mandel. I started with The Singers Gun, but probably enjoyed Station Eleven most. It was made into a series by HBO - I’m in “the book was better” camp. The Glass Hotel is also good, and Sea of Tranquility. A quirk is that various characters pop up or are referenced in different novels.
China Mieville is another writer I like a lot. I read most of his steampunk novels - Perdido Street Station and The Scar stand out. But my favourite was Embassytown, which is basically about language.
TIL Station Eleven has a tv adaptation, thanks for making me aware!
The City and the Stars is one of my all time favorites.
Only ever met one other persons who had ever even heard of her but I have a particular love for the works of Jaqueline Carey. The Sundering duology is gorgeous moral greyness with epic fantasy scale and yet personal characterization. The Kushiel series (the parts I have read so far) is the intertwining of political thriller, historical fiction, magical realism, BDSM romance, and again, has both epic scale plot and personal characters. I recommend the Sundering to everyone and Kushiel’s Dart to anyone old enough their mother won’t come around and attack me for exposing their son/daughter to the sexual parts of the book. There are others but those ones always come to mind when I see/hear this question.
I had taken a pretty long break from reading for leisure. I read Lord of the Rings in high school and was convinced I’d never find something that enjoyable ever again.
Then I read Dune and it really got me back into reading again. I also tackled the Mistborn trilogy and then the Stormlight Archive shortly after. There are also some other books by this same author that I picked up, such as Warbreaker.
Then I read the first 3 of the Red Rising books (I am waiting for the author to finish the series before I continue).
Then Dungeon Crawler Carl, and am now working my way through Wheel of Time.
Some of this was fueled by me swapping out my time I spent on Reddit to reading books and a lot of it was just enjoying books once I actually picked them up again.
All this to say…
Try Dune! If it feels confusing at first, just keep reading.
Or you can go into a more YA/easy read of Mistborn. Which is basically medieval fantasy. Think French Revolution era but with magic.
I read Dune this year and it was so good. Just unbelievably smooth prose with lots of complexity. I was only able to read the first two without needing a break for something else though
