I have been reading since I was about 3-4 years old, and it’s my favorite hobby. I’m looking for suggestions for new material to read. I have hundreds of books, and I took some pics of my shelves, but wasn’t allowed to post them here. So here’s a partial list of my “Doors to Other Worlds”:
Terry Pratchett - I am missing a few of the last discworld books, but I will remedy that soon. I think his writing - especially early on - has echoes of Douglas Adams in it, but it is very much his own cool style.
Douglas Adams - I’ve read every one of his books many times since high school (Thanks Todd!).
J.R.R. Tolkien - I have mostly everything, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Unfinished Tales, and The Histories of Middle Earth 5 book box set. THE pioneer of fantasy!
Clive Barker - Hands down my favorite horror author. His writing style (to me) is in the stratosphere. Unlike S.K. there are no botched beginnings or endings, no constant repetition, and his eloquent writing flows almost like music to me.
Phillip Dick - I own 3 collections of his short stories and 7 of his novels. Love his work and it’s very sad that he didn’t become well-known until long after he passed away. They have made a number of his books and short stories into films, including Blade Runner, Paycheck, Minority Report, both versions of Total Recall, and more.
Issac Asimov - The Foundation series was a surprise gift last year and quickly became one of the (many) high points of my collection. I have some of his other single novels, but he put out a LOT of books over the years, and I want them all!
Neil Gaiman - Fantasy with modern twists for the most part. Became a favorite quickly.
older horror writers: Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft collections, Mary Shelly (Frankenstein). I’d like to pick up the original Bram Stoker Dracula book and any other old horror books.
Cyberpunk - I currently have just a handful. William Gibson, Neil Stephenson, Philip Palmer, and Richard K. Morgan books round this one out. Tad Williams also wrote a really cool Cyberpunk style series called Otherland.
older science fiction - Frederick Pohl (a lot of books), Stanislaw Lem (the Cyberiad and Solaris), Robert Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land), Ray Bradbury (Farenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles) and H.G. Wells (the Time Machine and a couple others)..
Dystopian future stories - George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm), Walter M. Miller Jr (A Canticle for Leibowitz), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), Don DeLillo (White Noise), Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange), and a few historical books from Morris Berman (The Twilight of American Culture and The Reenchantment of the World). I also own both versions of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil movie (very similar in structure to 1984), and some similar movies
Classic Literature - too many to list, but Mark Twain, Harper Lee, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nickolai Gogol, Kurt Vonnegut, and William S. Burroughs are some of the high points.
So, any recommendations for new material to exercise my mind? Anyone read and recommened Sir Walter Scott or Charles Dickens? What about way older books? The Lost Boys, Dante’s Inferno, others that are considered some of the foundations of literature? No poetry please, that’s not my thing. I’ve tried Shakespeare, Homer’s Odysey, and Beowulf, and had a hard time with those.
Dropo: that sounds right up my alley, thank you!
Czarcasm: Just a lack of knowledge I guess. I have enjoyed Barbara Hambly, J.V. Jones and a few others over the years, but it seems to me like a male dominated field. Please prove me wrong and recommend some good books with female authors. I’m always up for broadening my horizons.
Based on your list and your request for female authors, I suggest you check out the “Wayfarer” series by Becky Chambers, starting with The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. The first book is pretty good, and then the second, A Closed and Common Orbit, is one of my favorite pieces of SF in the modern era.
Everyone should get a dose of magic realism, a literary style best created with an eloquent flow by Jorge Luis Borges, THE master of short story. Usually 4-20 pages tops, a few in the 30-40 page range, all sprinkled with unusual twists and turns, the spices of magic realism. Trust me, you’ll love these
Charles Dickens has some great books; David Copperfield and The Pickwick Papers are my favourites (The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, not so much). For Walter Scott, Ivanhoe is great, and Waverley and Rob Roy were fine; I think I stopped reading his books after that.
My personal favourite older writers:
Tobias Smollett. His books are quite funny and move quickly; not sententious in the least.
William Thackeray. Also very funny; Vanity Fair is an all-time classic and The Newcomes is one of my personal favourites.
Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are justly famous. Kidnapped is very good too. Try the short story collection New Arabian Nights, it’s great!
Emile Zola. I’ve only read his books in translation, but it’s great stuff – deep dives into different aspects of society. Some of my favourites are Germinal, The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) and The Drinking Den (L’Assomoir).
Jane Austen. Very popular for a reason, you can’t go wrong with any of her books.
One of my favourite 19th-century books is Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. Funny, moving, sad, heart-warming: it’s got it all.
(I read all of these authors via e-book from Project Gutenberg. Not sure where to get dead tree versions.)
Somebody on this board once recommended Robert Charles Wilson to me and I’ll pass it to you.
He’s a Canadian-American SF author. If you’re looking for a specific recommendation, I’ll suggest Spin, which won him a Hugo. Spin is admittedly the first book in a three book series. If you want to try a stand-alone work, I’ll suggest The Harvest.
The Matador series by Steve Perry is good, as is his other books. If you’ve ever noticed the Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread , the Khadaji in the title is a deceased poster who named himself after one of the main protagonists. Martial arts, guerilla war, intrigue, and a fair amount of philosophizing.
For female scifi authors you can’t really go wrong with CJ Cherryh. Perhaps the best writer of aliens I’ve run across, among other things.
I rarely re-read a book (there’s so much I haven’t read yet!), but I’m currently on my fourth time through this series. Do read the first two slim books, the second introduces a great character.
As the author, Martha Wells, says
Come for the pew-pew, stay for the soap opera.
There’s some nicely-plotted action, but the part I love is how a cyborg views humans (and snarkily comments on them).
Having recently hacked its Governor Module, this former assassin finds itself with free will and a hefty dose of PTSD.
The future society Wells has built is believable, and chilling: corporations lay claim to new planets rather than governments. The “good guys” are University research teams of scientists, required by powerful insurance companies to take Security 'Bots along on their expeditions.
Even ones that are secretly not obligated to follow orders…
The Avenue (two volumes, The Dreaming Suburb and The Avenue at War), by R F Delderfield – about the families who live along an avenue in an unnamed London suburb, from 1918 to shortly after the end of WW II.
Metzger’s Dog, by Thomas Perry – a very humourous story about a trio of small-time crooks and their leader’s girlfriend, who get tangled up with a local drug boss and a top-secret CIA project.
I second the recommendations for Bujold and Cherryh.
Star Rangers (aka The Last Planet) and Dark Piper, my two favourites by Andre Norton. She’s written dozens of other books, but those two are my favourites.
Killer, by David Drake and Karl Edward Wagner – an intelligent, vicious alien beast is loose in ancient Rome.
The Keep and The Tomb, by F Paul Wilson – the first (and in my opinion the best) two horror novels.s in the Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack series.
More humour? Illegal Aliens, by Nick Pollotta and Phil Foglio – aliens meet a NYC street gang.
The Hugo Awards (named for Hugo Gernsback, who produced the first all science fiction magazine) appear annually, voted on by fans attending the World Science Fiction convention. The awards started in 1953 and have been retro-ed into the 1940s, giving a sort of canon to the top works in the field. (As with any award, the selections are often controversial for what they include as well as what got omitted.)
The Hugo Award for Best Novel page contains the winners and nominees, nearly 400 books. One advantage they have is a listing of newer books, since the ones mentioned above are mostly a generation or two old, and often harder to find unless you search used books.
In a field of fanatical fans, awards proliferate, given out for every subgenre and interest. The Hugos are just the most famous. The Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards goes up through 2012 and was superseded by Mark Kelly’s Science Fiction Awards+ Database which runs from 2003 to the present. Mark tries - or used to - read every story published in the field every year and most of the novels, editing his own series of Best of the Year anthologies. Nobody knew how he managed that.
With the rise of fantasies and young adult and paranormal romance and horror and cli-fi and other dystopias overtaking old fashioned sf, the sheer variety of award subjects might be a way of cutting through the clutter.
Thank you everyone for your responses!
I also thought I would mention that I’ve always been a straight white guy raised in a Catholic school, but I’ve had some really nice LGBT+ friends, co-workers, and a few family members. I’d be receptive to fiction by authors in that group as well. Clive Barker is bi and is one of my favorite authors. Chuck Palahniuk writes in a very unusual and unconventional style that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But he did an interesting book with a transgender main character. I forget the name of the book at the moment.
No issues with fiction involving religion either. Barker’s Imajica was a great read and second only to Weaveworld, but most people in my family are Catholic/Christian. If I even gave an outline of the plot their heads would explode.
