The Vorkosigan series was recommended to me by my younger daughter. Despite 50+ years as an SF fan, I’d missed out on that series, and that author. Since picking up that first one, I’ve read everything by its author.
My daughter recommended I read The Eyre Affair. Jasper fforde is now one of my favorite writers.
Deliverance - James Dickey. My sister bought this for me (that’s sort of a recommendation isn’t it?) on my 15th birthday and it blew me away as it was my first grown-up novel I had ever read. I loved it. I just had no idea prior that characters could be so real and the story so gripping. I would like to re-read it, I think.
A quick question about this book that I promise I’m being genuine about and not threadshitting.
This book was recommended to me as well and I haaated it, but I also noticed it was part of a series and Eyre Affair was just the first book. Does the series change at all moving forward or is it more of the same?
What I didn’t like about it was the world-building made no sense to me and the plot rambled on and on without much direction. Does it get tighter in future books?
I read and loved that book myself, and the next two sequels. However, if you didn’t enjoy the first book, I’d say you probably won’t like the others, either.
My friend who recommended Fforde’s “Shades of Grey” to me also adores the Thursday Next series (of which The Eyre Affair is the first book), but she’s told me that a big part of her enjoyment of it is related to being a fan of classic English fiction – and, thus, she wasn’t at all sure if I’d like them.
I also was really… irritated, I guess, by The Eyre Affair. Don’t really know why. Too twee? Too smug? Something like that.
Mrs. Thompson, my fifth-grade teacher, read Sherlock Holmes stories aloud to the class during rest period. I still distinctly remember her reading “The Speckled Band” and “The Red-Headed League” to us. I love Holmes and Watson to this day.
My older sister was a huge Tolkien junkie and introduced me to the books. One of the proudest moments of my book-loving life was when, a few years ago, she conceded that I had surpassed her in my knowledge of Middle-earth. Woohoo!
Thanks for this. I’ll take it off my library list
John Varley’s Steel Beach was recommended by a friend who I usually dismissed because many of his reads were low-rent pulp trash space opera. Well, so was Steel Beach, but unashamedly self-aware of it and brilliantly executed. 
Varley’s been a favorite author ever since.
Hmmm… there’s two, actually.
The first is The Straight Dope: A Compendium of Human Knowledge by Cecil Adams.
Seriously.
A middle school teacher of mine, Brenda, wanted me to explore different genres of books and so recommended Cecil’s book (she actually bought some for the classroom and gave me a copy). I wasn’t too interested until I actually started reading it… and absolutely fell in love. I tried to mimic Cecil’s writing style in my own essays I had to write for school and even pitched an SD-style Q&A column written by me to the school newspaper. The book sparked a love of writing that I hadn’t possessed before and after high school I decided to pursue English in college. While I ended up majoring in History, I currently work as an English comp. instructor at my local community college—and I have Cecil to thank for lighting the fire.
As far as fiction goes, my mother recommended Shibumi by Trevanian when I was about the same age. I fell in love with it and still read it every few years.