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
Just remembered another one: Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson. I thought it was a remarkable book, but I’m sometimes a bit reluctant to recommend it. Definitely a “not for everyone” kind of book. It’s a fantastic work of hard sci-fi, but when I say hard, I mean hard. He spends an inordinate amount of time going on about orbital mechanics, but if you’re as interested in that as I am, then it’s a fantastic read. The last third or so of the book is also much less engaging, but the first 2/3 more than make up for that.
if you’re looking for a good fucking book, give the famous mathmatician and sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge, who was among the first wide-scale popularizers of the technological singularity concept and among the first to present a fictional “cyberspace” in his writing, book “A Deepness in the Sky” a read.
All of Robert Sheckley short stories are fucking cool. He also was very popular in the USSR and post-Soviet states.
Okay, last last rec: Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delaney is a poetic, schizophrenic epic about sex and violence in the rubble of the 60s. It’s honestly the kind of book that you’re never fully done reading.
Okay a lesser-known, but excellent one: The Four Fingers of Death is a sci fi novel written in the pomo literary mode by Rick Moody. It’s framed as a novelization of a 2025 film remake of the real-life 1963 B horror flick The Crawling Hand, about a disembodied hand that crawls around and kills people. It’s pretty funny, pretty sad, has a lot of weird shit stuffed into it.
