Need to get back into reading. Usually read horror literature and Russian works. But regardless, tell me your favorites !

So many, but this one has always fascinated me.

The Secret Life of Plants (1973)

• The Southern Reach Trilogy
• House of Leaves
• Lord of the Rings
• Narconomics
• The Library At Mount Char

This sounds really interesting. The Wikipedia page mentions that it's somewhat controversial. Could I ask how you interpret it?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the ensuing (five-book) trilogy were my favorites as a child and I haven't felt the need to update that. If you enjoy absurd British humor with a side of sci-fi, it will be worth a read for you, too.

Recently:

• Plainsong - just the prettiest book out there

• Anathem - cool sci-fi

• Perdido Street Station - gritty sci-fi

Nostalgic:

• Lord of the Rings

• I, robot (light, good to get back into reading)

• Brothers Karamazov (since you like Russians)

Triggered by this thread:

• Left Hand of the Darkness, by Le Guin (scifi and gender identity)

• Dune, by Herbert (scifi and ecology)

fiction: the lord of the rings cycle and watership down

non-fiction: a paradise built in hell by rebecca solnit

It’s a fascinating book.
I look at it with heavy skepticism but at the end I think there are some accusations that could be plausible and likely do occur, not so much for others. We now have seen evidence of certain fungal networks aiding root systems and establishing a level of very primitive communication, which also has its own critics as well Mycorrhizal network. So back to the book, i think some of the testing done in the 60s and 70s was more abstract art than evidence based science, but ultimately it does lead you to question whether the statements and findings could be true. Either way I found it a fascinating read, especially for someone that enjoys getting their hands dirty in the earth.

Tough to answer but currently;

• The Words We Keep.
• The Book Thief.
• Before The Coffee Gets Cold.
• 1984
• The Midnight Library.

Maybe a bit atypical but my favorite book is probably Homo Faber by Max Frisch.

Project Hail Mary is my go to recommendation.

I'm a big fan of Ken Follett's historical novels, and although I find the Century trilogy kinda jarring (it's very obvious the author is a social democrat who just doesn't like communism) his Kingsbridge series was absolutely awesome.
Kingsbridge is a fictional town in England, with the books in the series each following several characters throughout their life in a certain time period. First book was 1100s, then 1300s, 1500s, 1700s and a prequel around 998.
Also the first book was filmed into a series called Pillars of the Earth.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, long read, but probably one of the best books written.

Fiction: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Nonfiction: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

I felt the same way until I read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, also by Douglas Adams. I thought that and the sequel were even beter.

Technically not one book, but uhh... one/two book series: Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson.

Came here to say this. Only book I’ve finished and immediately read again. The audiobook is even better.

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Kind of a weird one because it’s technically incomplete, assembled by his longtime editor and his wife from materials going back to the 90s. I think it could’ve been his best work, even though I’ve always held that his nonfiction is superior.

I've just starting getting into a bit of russian/eastern europe scifi. "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin is incredible if you haven't read it. It is clearly the main inspiration for 1984, but just so much better. Then, just about any book by Stanislaw Lem is great. Solaris is probably the easiest to find and a pretty good more hard-ish sci-fi book, but I gotta recommend "Futurological Congress". It's hilarious! Reads like a Douglas Adams book, with an interesting idea at its core. So I think those are my most recent "favorite" books for the moment.

I put this in a comment below, but if you liked 1984 (I love dystopias!) it's worth reading "We" if you haven't. Orwell denies using this as inspiration, but We was clearly the precursor to 1984.

Of all time, a single book that's not part of a series, I still gotta go with Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein), or Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut)

The adventures of the Stainless Steel rat.

I would say Dune couple years ago. But given how this whole craze around the movies happen I'm not so sure anymore. Haven't seen them, scared doing so. I hated 80s Lynch one, because it felt retarded compared to the book and I don't want to feel this again.

Apart from Dune, there are plenty more. Older works of Clarke or Asimov for example, or most of Strugacky brothers works I've read were amazing too.

Salman Rushdie writes great novels.

Since douglas adams was mentioned a few times, I also highly recommend anything by P.G. Wodehouse if british humor is something you want to get into...

I'm currently re-reading Jostein Gaarder with my kids, also a great read I think.

Today, I would say Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. I don't really do hard rankings, though. Tomorrow it might be Pride & Prejudice or Persuasion.

Either way, y'all, do yourselves a favour and at least try Jane Austen once. She's often put in a corner with corny romance novels but I mostly love them, because she's snarky as hell and her characterizations are astonishingly timeless. Sure, there is romance in the novels and I definitely enjoy it, but maybe the following quotes taken from some final chapters give you an indication of the general tone:

*** and *** were married, the bells rang and everybody smiled

The wedding was very much like other weddings, where the parties have no taste for finery or parade.

Who can be in doubt of what followed? When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, ever so imprudent or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other's ultimate comfort.

• Ada, or Ardor, Nabokov.
• The Dispossessed, Le Guin.
• A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace, Martine.

How does a movie craze ruin your favorite book, if you haven't even seen any of the movies?
I wouldn't let it do that.

And even if you watched the movies - Which I wouldn't recommend. I only watched the first and wasn't too impressed, although I haven't even read the book either. - you could still love the book and just hold the opinion, that the movies weren't a great adaptation.

The Children of the Dead by Elfriede Jelinek is my number one. Second place is a tie between Women and Men by Joseph McElroy and The Tunnel by William H. Gass.

I'm not an avid reader (anymore) and can't even tell you any favorites.
But since you've mentioned liking horror and Russian authors: are you aware of Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch series?

I guess it's more fantasy than horror, and probably not like any of the Russian literature classics, but I just figured you might enjoy it.

Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick

floowed by

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. It will make you laugh and cry... At the same time. A brilliant anti-war book.

It's very similar to Vonneguts, Slaughterhouse 5.

You have flies in your eyes

Whoa haven't heard of any of these before, thanks for the fine literary recs.

As someone who loves Infinite Jest and enjoyed Brief Interviews, The Pale King didn’t do it for me.

The first movie of the modern trilogy is mostly exposition and world building, and it does drag. The second movie builds off the foundation of the first in a glorious way; the stakes are felt and it is truly a cinematic masterpiece. Some of the shots in that film give me goosebumps just thinking about them.

The Southern Reach trilogy isn’t given enough credit. Vander Meer does an amazing job explaining the unexplainable and his prose is pretty fucking beautiful, despite its modernity.

House of Leaves, which I’m in the middle of right now, is an all-consuming void and occupies my mind pretty much constantly. Which is cool, given the subject matter.

An excellent non-fiction book, that Catch-22. Required reading for anyone working in a corporation. Or anywhere really…

Entirely fair! I think the posthumous assembly of the novel — leaving most storylines necessarily incomplete — made it more of a rough draft than anything. I’m just glad it got published, since I love any literature about bureaucracy. My favorite part of IJ is the footnotes/endnotes, if that says anything.

I still love the book. But whenever I mention it, it's always something like "oh, it's the movie book, right?" or something like that. And no, that's not a reaction that makes me happy.

I've read the book decades before the movie happened and I loved it. I don't want to be tossed in the same bag with all these "I'm a huge Dune fan, it's the best movie ever" people. So I usually don't mention it.

Two favorites that I reread several times in my teens/twenties/thirties that I was recently thinking about:

• "Geek Love" by Katherine Dunn

• "At the sign of the naked waiter" by Amy Herrick

I've been trying to get so many people to read Southern Reach Trilogy. It's a fantastic slow burn that doesn't fill in too much and let's you think on it. I've actually gotten a friend to read House of Leaves before she's been willing to look at Southern Reach though. I have no idea what magic words I'm missing to sell it better.

Oh, also, if you enjoy House of Leaves you should check out Siderius Plug’s Immortality in Ninety-nine Endnotes I've heard good and similar things (though obviously much shorter and more hands on being a solo ttrpg). It's sitting on my stairs (where my books to read lay since wife filled our bookshelf) as my next "read".

Hmm, this slope is feeling slippery all of a sudden

Anything by Le Guin is soo good! Dispossessed is a particularly good one though. I read Lathe of Heaven earlier this year, and that was a fun ride.

The genre is ergodic literature. It's a very slippery slope. I'm just embracing it and sliding down headfirst

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.

Man I did not like The Midnight Library at all!

I think the premise was solid though. And I enjoyed the first 60% or so.

Hah. Dune is the book I recommened. I read it just before the movie trailers were announced.

I never ended up bothering watching the movies funnily enough.

Yooo is that where the names of all the Secret Life of XYZ things come from?

Pets, Walter Mitty, the American teenager, hell even the suite life of Zack and Cody?

Maybe it was already a general phrase before then?

I freakin love the show. Fiona Dourif is amazing

“Revelation Space” from Alastair Reynolds: a very solid hard science fiction space opera.

“Neuromancer” from William Gibson: the seminal cyberpunk novel where the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

“Destination: Void” from Frank Herbert: starts inside a space ship, a bit dark.

Haha, no idea if there was ever an association between the two, possible but not likely lol.