A few I’ve read at least twice and will definitely read again at some point:
- Catch 22
- Infinite Jest
- The Windup Bird Chronicle
- The Handmaid’s Tale
- Full 5 part Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy
- His Dark Materials Trilogy (plus the Book of Dust series, if we ever get that last one!!)
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Brave New World
- Slaughterhouse Five
Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
I’m on my 13th or so read of Blindsight. Think I’ve unpacked it all, finally. I feel like a fruitcake having read it and *Echopraxia" so many times, but damn they’re deep.
Not a fan of all of Watt’s novels, but those two feel like he packed something to think about into nearly every single sentence. Easy read if you want to go fast, or, take your time and dig in. Never read a novel(s) that could go both ways.
Fuck me. Just talking about it is getting me hype for another run.
Blindsight:
"I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.
To this day, I still don’t know what went wrong.”
Echopraxia:
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
The Murderbot diaries.
This is also an awesome thread. I see a lot of books I love and a lot that I’m interested in.
While I enjoyed the first book, and might pick up the others, I wasn’t as impressed, and wouldn’t put it on any reread shortlist. What did I miss?
The Bobiverse recommendations seem to go hand in hand with Murderbot. Read both series back to back, didn’t know what I was missing.
Several that others have already mentioned, and:
- The Golden Age Oecumene, by John C Wright
- The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, by Barry Hughart
- Any and all of The Culture novels
- The Hobbit, and TLotR trilogy. Used to read them every summer, for about twenty years.
- Armor, by John Steakley. Sadly, the only sci-fi novel he ever wrote, and one of only two books he ever authored, IIRC.
- The Jean le Flambeur trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi, which is on my list to read again this year.
- A Wizard of Earthsea trilogy, which I’m about to read again as soon as my wife finished them.
- The Chronicles of Narnia, which I used to read frequently when younger. I’m almost afraid to pick them up again now, for fear that they won’t be as good (for an adult) as I remember.
Love the culture series! Communism… In space!!! Though I’d say to anyone who hasn’t read them yet to skip the first and come back to it. It’s a great novel, but it smells like the 80’s. Was my first read in the series and it turned me off to the rest of them until years later when I have the series another chance
IMHO, post-scarcity is really the only way communism works. And it’s not true communism in the Culture; people still own things - artifacts, art, themselves. And it’s also not communism in the Marxist sense, where the workers own the means of production, because there isn’t a working class and production is largely automated. It’s some sort of post-Communism thing we don’t have a name for. Or, maybe we do, and I just don’t know it?
Easier to say which books I WOULDN’T read again.
The Art of War in the Middle Ages. Just interminable.
There was another book, I can’t recall the name of it unfortunately. It was about ethical non-monogamy but went into such blatantly STUPID territory that I classed it as “should not be set aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force.”
One of the more stupid statements was about how gangbang porn is prevalent (multiple men, one woman), but the inverse doesn’t exist. I was like “Fuck off, you aren’t looking very hard then…”
Edit My wife assures me it was “Sex at Dawn”.
Adam Levin’s The Instructions
Ecclesiastes
Philip K. Dick’s Galactic Pot-Healer — actually most Dick outside of A Scanner Darkly
Neal Stephenson’s… well, anything, but especially Zodiac, Anthem, and Diamond Age
Brian Daley’s Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds
Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and The Blind Assassin
Anything by Ursula LeGuin, ever
Hugh McLeod’s Ignore Everybody
Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series
Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Trilogy
Adam Levin’s The Instructions
I have that on my shelf, but have only read the first chapter or so, I think, just couldn’t get into it. Bought on a whim, partly because of how huge it was!
I take it it’s worth another shot?
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. A comic book about comic books, cartoons, sequential art, and art in general.
Nobody has yet mentioned A Gentleman in Moscow, so I will. It’s fairly recent, but I know I’ll read it again in a couple of years.
Project Hail Mary was amazing. Can’t wait for the movie too.
There will be a movie‽‽‽
Story spoiler:
spoiler
“No voice actor for rocky has not been announced” - A voice actor for… musical notes?
It’s got Ryan Gosling cast as the main, I think?
Books. Multiple.
The Practice Effect by David Brin. It’s an isekai (it’s not anime, but it’s an isekai) where things get MORE useful when you use them, reversing entropy.
Sentenced to Prism. MC is sent on a mission to a world inhabited by silicate based life forms. Shenanigans ensue. Mildly autistic coded MC.
Resurrection Inc. The dead are resurrected as mindless zombie robots. Sometimes it goes wrong and the dead regain their memories. The MC does. Hijinks ensue.
edit - more
Mistborn Chronicles - an orphan gets super powers in a very messed up world. A group recruits her for a heist.
Too many to count. Foundation trilogy, anything by Heinlein, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke or various other classic sci fi writers, any Conan book or story, any Jeeves book or story, The Mote in God’s Eye by Niven & Pournelle, Mary Lasswell’s Mrs. Feeley books (pretty obscure), anything by HP Lovecraft…
World War Z has hit differently after major life stages: College, marriage, kids, global pandemic, etc.
I have all discworld books, I would definitely reread most of them. I just reread The Hail Mary Project.
Third run through Discworld in the past 2 years. My god, been trying to think how to explain to my best friend. I lack the words.
I’m going through the Discworld series for the first time right now. I’m going in chronological order but when I finish I’ll probably go through them again eventually but I think I’ll do series instead in bunches. I’m already looking forward to rereading the Watch series back to back.
On my third pass right now. Skipped a couple of the first novels, but I love the original order. Got feels for all the series, but I like the perfect way he kept them mixed up.
“Oh shit! Another witches book!”
“Back to the Watch! NICE!”
“Rincewind? Hell with it, those are all funny as hell.”
Also, I keep meaning to make time to re-read some required reading books from HS: Where the Red Fern Grows, Call of the Wild, Flowers for Algernon. It’s probably all going to be painfully YA, but I’ve thought about the stories often over my life, and they deserve a re-read.
