I’ve been trying to go to the library and read more but I’m out of ideas for what to read next. Help plz.
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I recently read my way through all Becky Chamber’s works and then The Murderbot Diaries. They were quite enjoyable and I very much recommend them.
Seconding all of this
I started The Wayfarer series on your rec!
The Monk and Robot books fuck hard.
The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
Oh, yeah. Whole Culture series.
Absolutely. My favorites are Surface Detail and Excession, but I think Player of Games is the best entry point to the series.
I was gonna recommend the Culture!
uhhh, the Expanse series is cool too. not as based commie but it’s fun if kinda depressing scifi
Plenty of Culture books to recommend, what’s your favorite?
Excession is my favourite but it’s not a good one to start with in my opinion.
Consider phlebas is a pretty straightforward one. It’s got a normal timeline and does a good job of introducing the culture and their history.
Don’t sleep on his non culture SciFi story the algebraist either, it’s excellent.
If I had read Consider Phlebas first I probably would not have read the rest of the Culture series, I really strongly dislike it. After reading other Culture books, it does have some interesting stuff about the Idiran war, but it’s so atypical, and the main character so fundamentally unlikable, that it makes the worst possible introduction to the series.
Player of Games is good! I started with Consider Phlebas which I quite enjoyed but Use of Weapons stuck out to me when I was first reading them!
spoiler
I may have had to read it twice to keep the intersecting plots straight but that’s my own ADHD more than anything
A lot of Culture books hit better on the second read
Consider Phlebas is skippable tbqh but it definitely exists
It’s been a long time since I was it, but A Confederacy of Dunces was a fun read
Excellent recommendation. Ignatius is a true poster invented by the author before posting was invented.
Another similar book from 100 years earlier is A Rebours by JK Huysmans. It’s about a fail child aristocratic son who retreats from the real world into the realm of aesthetics. It’s absolutely jammed with esoteric references to the art and artists of the time, but if you can look past the references you won’t get, I guarantee that any hexbear poster will recognize the ancestors of the modern spoiled lib.
You can’t go wrong with Discworld if you’re into fantasy/satire.
If you like soft scifi then I recommend the Imperial Radch trilogy. Featuring:
- Protagonist with a very interesting backstory (it’s the point of like half of the first book so I won’t spoil)
- A post-gender (?) empire
- A dictator with a networked consciousness so she can be present everywhere
- Default she/her pronouns
- The one true throuple (I ship it!)
- A kind of boring middle book
- Body and brain horror?
- WEIRD aliens! (although you only see them through their proxies)
- Good old aristocracy in space
- Like almost no one is white
- Set thousands of years in the future
edit: everyone is recommending scifi lol
That’s because scifi is the best genre
How dare you say something so controversial yet so true
“yeah I’m gonna read a book about just like a guy who lives in an apartment in New York and is sad or some shit”
statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged
Oh also Unjust Depths
Philip K Dick if you are into sci fi
I’ve already read a decent amount of Dick. And Vonnegut. Most classic alt-sci-fi really.
The Outside by Ada Hoffmann, which is a cool horror tinged space opera about eldritch physics horror, cybernetic angel cops, mutual aid and organising
also
It has lesbians & many other queers in it. Of course it does, I’d never let you down baby
Octavia butler is very good.
A fun historical fiction series is Colleen McCullough’s masters of Rome series. I enjoyed that one for the balance of great man theory (which makes it an actual story) with a more class based understanding of the late Republic. It’s well researched. It’s pretty horny at times.
The Dispossessed by Ursual Le Guin is lovely and a perennial favorite of mine.
cormac mccarthy
thomas ligotti
a third one, i forget
Hunger by Knut Hamson.
Hamson was a fascist, Nazi sympathizer to be clear but still a great book on poverty and idealistic, self-destructive pride.
Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen.
A very interesting proto-existentialist, late-Romantic novel about a disillusioned young man and some of his relationships.
My reading list:
spoiler
I just finished breakfast of Champions in like 4 days. Such a good read.
Anything of general note written by David Foster Wallace. He wrote a lot so you may be able to find a dud
Been reading Memed My Hawk by Yashar Kemal for awhile now. Solid novel about a Turkish kid who becomes a bandit. Politically excellent. The first few pages are a little slow so don’t let them stop you.
Since I got my first full-time job in years I had this uncontrollable urge to read Michael Crichton’s Sphere. Don’t judge me too harshly. It’s kind of shitty and awesome at the same time? Like it’s almost just an outline for a movie script but it’s still keeping my interest as I’m dying of boredom at work. As a writer I can’t help being impressed by how Crichton throws a twist at you like every five pages for hundreds of pages. A high school friend of mine was obsessed with him.
