Asklemmy

The dystopic books that warn us of what we could be.

1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, Animal Farm, The Giver (and yes, you should still read The Giver even if you're an adult if you've never read it before).

But the first book that flashed through my mind when I read the question was Slaughterhouse Five.

Hmm, considering your religious upbringing you might want to try some absurdist literature to break the mold.

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• The Cyberiad
• Discworld
• The Little Prince

These are accessible too, as you're not used to reading yet.

I can also recommend subscribing to a monthly magazine and making a point to read it from cover to cover. That way your skills will improve. You can also buy a whole stack of old national geographics cheaply. This will expand your horizons.

As far as good storytelling, some of my favs are:

• The count of monte cristo
• The arabian nights
• 100 years of solitude
• The silmarillion
• A confederacy of dunces
• The three musketeers

I have a very long ranked list, but there's a few.

For literature I find 100 years of Solitude to be without equal. An absolute joy to read.

For nonfiction I have learned so much from 1491. It was recommended to me by a friend though I have never heard of it elsewhere. The premise is that basically everything we think about Native Americans before Columbus arrived is wrong. I could go on but here is one tidbit: we tend to think of Native Americans as peoples without government. Now of course there are so many different groups of peoples all over the Americas and across so many eras it’s foolish to even think of them as being this way or that way because who and when are you referring to? But there were many types of government. In fact the Incas were total bureaucrats! Anyway I’m doing a poor job selling it i know but it’s a great read.

For self-help try How to Win Friends and Influence People. I know the title sounds like it’s a guide to manipulation but it’s really not. It’s 100 years old but still holds up so well. Times change, but people don’t, you know what I mean? People 100 years later still appreciate it when you remember their name and look them in the eye and make time to listen.

While other books have made a larger personal impact, Piranesi is a wonderful, easy to read mystery novel with a charming, innocent protagonist that I wish I could read for the first time all over again.

It's only a couple hundred pages as well, as opposed to the thousand page monsters many people love.

Fahrenheit 451 is certainly worth a read. I read it late in life, and could see immediately why it's so often read in schools. Very well written, and a compelling story.

Another book that you may find quite personally compelling is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (Archive.org has a free audio book version), due to the themes it covers.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Discword series is really good. - very witty comedy with subtle commentary about real world

I wouldn't say it's must read but I can't reccomend it highly enough: "Ascendance of a Bookworm" - an slow adventure about a girl struggling with an unknown disease in another world, and all she wants is to read books.

you can also hang out in [email protected] and tell about your experience.

Ursula Le Guin's the dispossessed is pretty impactfull. Very confronting anarchist utopia that is not a Paradise.

The lions of al rassan by guy gavriel Kay (worked on the silmarillion). A deeply melencholic fictional reflection on the reconquista of the Iberian peninsula.

The liveship traders by Robin Hobb has the best realised characters in fiction I've ever seen. Jaw dropping craft.

And finally, an entire shelf of book: The malazan book of the fallen. you will laugh, you will cry, and in the end you will love compassion.

From a philosophy standpoint, Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. It's a brutally tough read, but a very interesting perspective of a Holocaust survivor and some of the more "mundane" parts (which were still horrific) in between the parts most people know about. The philosophy that follows is interesting.

It's certainly not without it's faults and criticisms, though.

• All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing are beautiful western novels by Cormac McCarthy. Both are very much “a boy and his horse” kind of stories about learning to be yourself. They’re loosely related and there’s a third book that brings the boys together and concludes their stories

• The Jungle and Oil! by Upton Sinclair are novelizations of Sinclair’s investigative journalism work in the meat packing industry and the nascent workers rights movement respectively. Oil! was very loosely adapted into the film There Will Be Blood (the film covers maybe the first 3-4 chapters by greatly expanding upon the material

• Hatchet by Gary Paulsen was a very impactful book for me as a child. It’s a YA novel, but still worth a read. The main character Brian survives a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness and is forced to find a way to survive on his own

A few more recent novels that I enjoyed:

• Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. Won the 2024 Booker Prize (best English language novel) about an authoritarian government taking power in Ireland and how that unfolds from the perspective of a mother with young children. It’s a hard read, but very well written

• Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez. Translated into English. A friend described it as “sexy witches in South America deal with authoritarian rule.” And that’s pretty close…

• Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park. A semi-fictionalized history of the Korean Peninsula and the desire to have a unified identity. Many people come to the peninsula (same bed) with very different goals for its use (different dreams). Really fascinating book and engaging

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Follows a trio of friends as they explore the world of video game design. Starts in the early 80s and runs through the 2000s. Reminder me very much of the show Halt and Catch Fire.

• My Friends by Hisham Matar. Follows a Libyan immigrant living in England in the 80s through 2010s as he wrestles with his identity, his homeland, his friends and family. Khaled’s closest friends serve as foils to his own feelings, reacting to the same circumstances very differently from himself

How about some pre-transhuman solarpunk? I recommend my favorite book, Walkaway by Cory Doctorow. It's about the birth pangs of a post scarcity society. Absolutely brilliant.

The Stranger by Albert Camus, Franny & Zooey by JD Salinger, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and the entire short story collection of Edgar Allan Poe

Especially if you're new to reading, the books worth reading are the ones you enjoy reading.

Like anything else reading is a skill and you get better at it the more you do it. There's a reason we don't start kindergarteners on Tolstoy and Shakespeare.

There are great suggestions in this thread so I'm not going to suggest any more. But I'd recommend to start every new book with an open mind, but if you're not "feeling it" by page 10 or 20 it's 100% okay to put it down and try a different one.

You can always come back to it later. Or not. There are more "must read" books than can ever be read in a lifetime. Find the ones you enjoy and which make an impact on you.

• Catch 22
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series)

The best science fiction has to offer:

Metro 2033

Sphere

Jurassic Park

Roadside Picnic

Metamorphosis

Add from Stephen King:

Night Shift

4 Minutes to Midnight

(Both are novellas/story collections)

And also:

The Call of Cthulhu and other weird tales

Lots of great suggestions involving story craft and the like, so I'll target the "religious hangups" bit with a couple non-fiction books:

• Sentience by Nicholas Humphrey (great to get a perspective on consciousness and sentience that isn't marred with religious doctrine)

• Determined by Robert Sapolsky (a primatologist with a knack for getting you comfortable with the notion that we don't have as free a will as religion tells us)

And just to include a bit of fiction:

• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (about life as we know it, or maybe as we don't)

• Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (deals with overwritten cultures. Also dragons.)

Ben Franklin’s Autobio, Black Elk Speaks, Slaughterhouse Five

I'd happily recommend anything by Brandon Sanderson, I generally find everything he writes to be an easy read.

Also, get an account at your local library, it's much easier/cheaper to fly through books that way. Tip: if your library sucks, many libraries will accept you as local if you work in the town. (I belong to two library systems this way)

I can never stop recommending The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.

Its some of the most beautiful, cozy writing I've ever had the pleasure of reading, all wrapped in queer and race allegory and science fiction splendour.

Please read it.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein is one the books I read during my formative years that I still think about a lot.

If you like graphic novels, The Sandman by Neil Gaiman is fantastic. Great writing and great artwork.

Won't be taking very much of your time:

Kafka's The Trial, Shelley's Frankenstein, Machiavelli's Prince, Rulfo's Pedro Paramo

Just to avoid naming the very obvious ones.

It’s YA but I suggest Hatchet because it’s the book I remember actually making an impression on me.

No idea what your reading level is, but here are some of the suggestions I've made to customers recently:

Harry Potter, if for no other reason than the cultural impact

Ender's Game: children being taught to be elite military officers

Small Gods: satirizes religion, religious institutions, etc. If you ever want to read Discworld, this is a very good starting point

We Free Men: also Discworld, but YA-focused and about a girl who becomes a witch

Lamb, the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal: author imagines what Jesus and his BFF Biff were doing for those thirty years missing not recorded in the Bible.

Kindred: a woman starts to travel back in time to the pre-Civil War South. She can't control it and she doesn't know why. Probably Butler's most accessible novel.

A Canticle for Leibowitz: humanity nuked itself back to the early medieval period and this one holy order watches it rebuild. It's hard to describe this book in a satisfactory way without just summarizing it, but it's one of my favorites and I've read it multiple times

The Giver: YA dystopian novel about a very structured society and the kid who is able to see through it. The sequels aren't too bad either

The Hobbit: much easier to read than Lord of the Rings, but full of the same heroics plus dragons, dwarves and a clever hero

Recently, I really enjoyed the scholomance trilogy by Naomi Novik. Had anti capitalist themes and cool world building. main character can be a little polaraizing though, she can be "b wordy" for lack of a better less misogynistic term coming to mind, I've seen some talk about how much they hated her character and others how much they loved her (I personally loved her)

as an aside, https://annas-archive.org/ is your friend for getting books for free!

I also come from a religious family, which is why I say: For a fun read, please read Lamb, the Gospel According to Biff by Christopher Moore. Honestly, everything by Kurt Vonnegut, but if I have to pick, Harrison Bergeron is one of the best short stories I have ever read, and I carry Cat's Cradle in my heart.

Someone else suggested Catch-22, and I consider it a must read.

The Sun Also Rises is my favorite cock-and-bull story, but also, incredible for learning how to read critically. What I mean is, Hemingway is a 2 for 1 deal. There's the story that's written out, but when you read it again, you see everything he didn't say is a whole different story. Hemingway was a very deliberate writer, every word chosen for a reason, so when reading his work, it enhances the experience to ask yourself why he would choose to write that way.

But if you want some real good recommendations, I suggest finding a banned books list.

Godel, Escher, Bach
Infinite Jest
The Lord of the Rings
The Demon-Haunted World
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Slaughterhouse-Five
Small Gods
Master and Commander

and everything else written by those authors.

The first two or three on that list might take several fits and starts to get through, YMMV, but they are WELL worth the effort, and you will come out the other side changed by the experience. The others are all pretty easily digestible, but no less transformative.