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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Project Hail Mary is my go to recommendation.

I've read "Player of games" by Iain M. Banks so many times I broke it and had to buy a second copy.

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)

The Silmarillion has endured since my early teens. I've read it closer to ten times in the past 20 years.

So many, but this one has always fascinated me.

The Secret Life of Plants (1973)

The adventures of the Stainless Steel rat.

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 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.

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)

Tough to answer but currently;

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

Fiction: The Lord of the Rings, it's a basic answer but it's just so good.

Non-Fiction: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

I used to read fiction mysteries as a teenager. In adult life I thought reading for leisure "wasn't for me". Tried some popular stuff (Davinci code, Harry Potter, etc) and hared it. Tried other universally recommended books like Catch 22 and Hitchhikers guide and couldn't get through them and found them boring as sin. Thought this meant I just don't like reading. Turns out non-fiction is my jam. So 2 of the best books for me have been:

Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman

Criminal: The Truth About Why People Do Bad Things - Tom Gash

“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.

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 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.

My single favourite book is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

Honourable mentions to:

• Catch-22 - Heller
• Slaughterhouse 5 - Vonnegut
• To the Lighthouse - Woolf
• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Garcia Marquez
• The Windup Bird Chronicle - Murakami
• Pride and Prejudice - Austin
• Burr - Vidal
• Brave New World - Huxley
• The Handmaid's Tale - Atwood
• Hitchhikercs Guide to the Galaxy - Adams

Currently reading, and enjoying, Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 🙂

EDIT - also head over to !Books@lemmy.world for lots of chat and more recommendations

Jude the Obscure. It's a tragedy. It's an old book, and a classic, but it isn't everyone's cup of tea. I recommend giving it a try of you like consuming tragedies as much as I do.

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.

fiction: the lord of the rings cycle and watership down

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

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

Einstein's Dreams

A series of short stories of what life would be like if time worked differently. One where there is no future. One where you can run to places in time. One where time slows and speeds up in different places.

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

The City and the Stars is one of my all time favorites.

The Fifth Season (first book in the Broken Earth trilogy) by N.K. Jemisin. It's fantasy but with pretty logical boundries on the supernatural elements. I love the writing, plot, character development, and world-building.

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

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.

Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick

floowed by

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

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.