It’s YA but I suggest Hatchet because it’s the book I remember actually making an impression on me.
That is an excellent suggestion. I would also like to add Jack London's To Build A Fire for a similar impact.
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
For nonfiction I would recommend books about media criticism and history. Manufacturing consent and The Jakarta Method, for example. These can help set you up for further reading. For media criticism, it will help you recognize when to keep reading about the people that journalists talk to and who they don't, why they are writing this article rather than that one, and identify others that take a media critical approach, as they are good people to read. For history, I think it is good to read widely and critically. We are not taught particularly thorough or accurate history in school. Much is left out or glossed over with selective narratives. For example, I was taught that the US Civil War was about states' rights, not slavery, because the text was from Texas and my teacher taught from the book. This was, of course, nonsense. A People's History of The United States is a pretty good way to start out if you want to start with US history. That might be better than The Jakarta Method, actually.
For fiction, it really depends on what you enjoy! What kinds of stories or topics do you find most interesting?
All of HP Lovecraft's stories.
a few books that I found enjoyable recently
+1 for the whole Culture series of books. My personal favourite is Look to Windward but they're all good.
Yeah, it's a good series overall.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen
Most things by Henry James
James Joyce has a good catalogue, I recommend treating a book like the Odyssey as a college course and reading prerequisite reading such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the original Odyssey (and it's precursor the Iliad).
This should be a good years worth on its own!
The Mountain, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Magus.
Cloud Atlas.
im a piers anthoy fan and his incarnation of immortality series is his known magnus opa but the geodesy serries is the real one. foundation was isaac asimovs but he ends up sorta combining a bunch of his work into all one mega world. his ip is really undervalued. nine princes of amber for zelazny. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever for donaldson. river of the dancing gods is neat. oh there are many really
Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck. And probably Of Mice And Men.
Fifty Shades Of Grey
I’ve always struggled to find a good book to read. I love having books read to me, but to pick one up myself has always been a struggle.
So when I say I’ve love the Ascendance of a Bookworm series, know that this is one of maybe 2 or 3 series I actually read. It’s a fantasy story about one little girls dream of trying to read books in a world without books. The premise is silly on paper, but the world building and characters are so detailed and flushed out that I’ve gotten sucked in and read throughout the whole series multiple times.
The novels just finished the main series with Part 5 Volume 12, there an anime of good to mixed quality, and a manga too. Tips for new readers is to watch the anime before reading as Part 1 is not as smooth as the rest.
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The Brothers Lionheart, by Astrid Lindgren is one of my childhood favourites. Originally Swedish but has been translated into English.
The Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt another childhood fav., it has been translated from Dutch. Actually, anything by Dragt I loved, but not sure which have translations or not.
In terms of adult fiction, I was hooked on Stig Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series (he only wrote the first 3 though).
Someone mentioned Kurt Vonnegut; I recommend the one I've read of his: Slaughterhouse 5.
The Circle still gives me pause more than 5 years later. It's by Dave Eggers.
out of position
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan. Kalki by Gore Vidal. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley. Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Atonement by Ian McEwan. Being Dead by Jim Crace.
If you've already read a lot of books, you should give If On A Winter's Night A Traveller a go.
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