Alright here it is. I honestly have no idea what I’m doing with this since I have barely read anything since middle school (maybe a book or two a year). My contributions will primarily be manga. If I need to add a genre or period let me know. This series will eventually be canonized into the sidebar as a definitive recommendation list of all things C/Lit.
Future threads:
Periods: Pre-1800, 1800s, 1900-50, 1951-99, 2000-20, 2021
Genres: Children’s, Comedy, Coming of age, Folklore, Historical, LGBT, BIPOC Related, Philosophy, Pop Culture, Religious, Thriller, Western, Young Adult, Action, Adventure, Survival, Crime, Mystery, Fantasy, Romance, Horror, Graphic Novel, Biography, Travel, Historical, Propaganda, Philosophy, Political Theory, Poetry, Plays, Manga, Speculative Fiction, Sports, and Miscellaneous
I love Philip K Dick. I find him easy to read and fun, if you can get past some old timey misogyny. The short stories are great to get started: minority report, We can remember it for you wholesale (the one they based total recall on I think)
I really liked vulcan’s hammer which is about an AI that goes rogue and a kind of weird religion that grows around it
And the three stigmata of palmer eldritch. Which has this shared psychedelic dream state/alternate reality that serves as a kind of escape from the gruelling life of off-world colonists
I ripped the audiobooks off of youtube. Highly recommended! :stalin-approval:
Phillip K. Dick is a weird one for me. He is extremely my shit in many ways, but has such a weird, frothing hate for women
He really does. Also I heavily misread the ask for this thread. Though he’s still among my favs I dunno if he should be in the Best Texts Ever. :chumpsky:
The Three-Body Problem trilogy is a pretty mind-opening experience if you can get through the sloggy bits in the middle book. A vast, endless night of doom-pilling with a few faint stars of hopium here and there. Liu Cixin has a knack for making the vast, alienating spatio-temporal scale of the universe come to life in narrative.
I tried and failed to read this. But after this glowing review I’m gonna give it another go! Thanks for the rec :heart-sickle:
The first book is essentially a mystery. It grabbed me, but if that central conceit doesn’t grab you, I can understand how it could be really hard to get through. But that moment where the mystery comes together is so good, and it sets up such a good premise for the rest of the series. The problem is, you can’t then discuss that premise to try to sell the series without completely spoiling the first book.
EDIT: There is some weird misogyny spread throughout the books, though. One of the deuteragonists of the first book is a woman who is (IIRC) very well written, but after that there’s some weird ideas about women and the nature of femininity sprinkled throughout.
I have never seen a book- or any piece of media- continually top itself to the degree the third book did. Every time you’re like “oh, I see what’s going on, now I know what the rest of the book will be”, it turns out that that either what you were expecting or an event to subvert those expectations will happen in the next 10 pages, and the scope of the book will increase to the degree that what you previously expected just suddenly seems to not matter at all
Alright, let’s see how many of these threads I can recommend The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in.
Ken MacLeod’s fall revolution series. Trotskyists innnn Spaaace.
