I wanted to drop some American short stories that I recommend.
Since you can't buy 1 book with all of them I've linked an online source that you can print if you love paper.
If you like a story I recommend getting the book that the story is a part of.
In no particular order:

Pastoralia by George Saunders (2000)
Defender of the Faith by Philip Roth (1959)
Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin (1957)
Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice by Nam Le (2012)
People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk by Lorrie Moore (1997)
Rock Springs by Richard Ford (1987)

the fire next time & notes of a native son by james baldwin. both are collections of essays but i never get tired of reading or hearing him.
the nickel boys by colson whitehead
in the heart of the sea by nathaniel philbrick
house of leaves by mark z danielewski, though i dont think the book is that great i did think it was fun to read

weirdly elitist perspective of a classic text that reeks of a first year literature student. why not read the ancient greek text instead if ur gonna bash someone about which translation theyre reading? why not read classics as they were "meant to be read"? why not huddle around a fire while some guy with a harp recites the whole thing from memory, making up his own version throughout the course of multiple nights? to stan someones english translation so hard is to completely miss the point of studying classics. ive read multiple translations, lattimores, popes and fagles' included, and vastly prefer caroline alexanders, a much more recent and easy to read one. literature, especially classics, is not about gatekeeping.

Gatekeeping and elitism are the only defenses small communities have against the mass culture that constantly threatens to consume them. This kind of chauvinism is frequently pig-headed and self-defeating, but even when it is, it is driven by that survival instinct.

I'll assume you're right and this book is good, you seem knowledgeable about this stuff. But reading the articles and reviews, the praise the book received focused on its "authenticity to the LGBT themes of the Greek original." I'll buy that the buttfucking was always there, what I don't buy is this convenient projection of modern conceptions of sexuality backwards onto a people with their own culture + philosophy. This looks to me like an attempt by the dominant culture of our time to colonize the past with its own values. Exactly the type of colonization the gatekeeping instinct clumsily attempts to stave off.

Sherlock Holmes
Caste and Outcast by Dhan Gopal Mukerji
The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz
The Gameplayers of Zan
The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen
The Invincible by Stanislav Lem
The World as I see it by Einstein
My View of the World by Schrodinger

idk what u nerds r talking about but the inkheart series is pretty good

i just finished dune part 1 and loved it

im literally only saying that cos wandum already said he didnt like the new book lol. if miller's book gets people into classics thats great, if they like it by itself thats great, i feel like im doing the opposite of gatekeeping. i generally agree with kiki on everything here but i just think youve slightly misunderstood where im coming from

and yes i would love to be able to read the original texts or hear a homeric recitation but i cant. i tried going thru my dads homeric greek companions and it just never really clicked for me in a natural enough way to really feel like reading

also dont see how recommending a (widely beloved) translation is "stanning" one, im just trying to give a good entry point which i dont think you can say it isnt

anyway, i havent read alexanders translation but per your recommendation ill try to grab a copy for my next read :)

without gatekeeping we get beowulf translations that start with the word "bro"

The Golden Bough by James G. Frazer - Man spends 50 years trying to solve the mystery of a Roman cult, and in the process amasses an awesome treasury of lore on almost any culture you can think of. Some of it made up or misremembered by his sources.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman - Odd, transparently personal, moving novel from a man who usually sublimates his private traumas into wacky fairy tales.

Moby Dick - The American Faust in the sense of embodying the spirit of a culture, America being both at war with and in awe of, God, and God's creation.

Typee by Herman Melville - Account of the time he got kidnapped by cannibals and bartered for tobacco. Rare window into a world that had vanished by the time anthropology got its shit together.

I loved the Stormlight Archive and Mistborn series by Sanderson, if anybody wants to talk high/grimdark fantasy or needs recommendations talk to me, I'm a huge nerd for fantasy. Children of time was also my favorite sci-fi book i've read semi-recently. Imagine an intelligent and evolving spider civilization interacting with humans and other intelligent insects, but it makes you think yeah this could maybe happen.

Loved Wheel of Time, it took me almost a year to read it all, but the books are way better than the TV show amazon prime is running right now. It gets a lot better after the first book. Robert Jordan wrote the first book like a LOTR clone so publishers would pick it up.

Three Body Problem is definitely one of my favorite Sci-Fi books all time. It does have some weird tangents, but its super thought provoking and scary at times.

Recently I've been into Stephen King and that's kind of propelled me to get into horror. Standouts from Stephen King for me were The Institute (newer book by him), Salem's Lot, The Stand (he somewhat considers it his magnums opus) and Duma Key (this really weird book about a telekinetic/pathic painter).

For horror I've been reading House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. This book is really weird and has a cult following. If you want to know more you should probably just google it.

Just noticed Patrick Rothfus was mentioned. I love this trilogy. I read it a while back and it gets a lot of hate because of an overpowered protagonist/weird sex scenes in the second book, but I loved the prose. I've never read a book that flows quite like that, and because the prose is so good I really felt like I could visualize the character interactions and hear the character's voices. I could not put it down. I don't think I've enjoyed a fantasy series as much as those two books.

Necro but I found Wheel of Time to be really good, got through the first seven in about three months & they held my interest a lot better than stuff like Game of Thrones did.

Just don't be fooled into thinking it's a trilogy like I was and end up in too deep

I’ll try to get the ball rolling again because I like reading.

Just finished all of Kurt Vonnegut’s work and I’ve been trying to read the odyssey and Iliad as of late.
I’ll drop some of my favorite books so far:

Mitch Weiss’ The Heart of Hell - The Heart of Hell is the untold story of the crew of Landing Craft Infantry 449 (gunboat that assisted in the assault on Iwo Jima). Based on 130 interviews with sailors who survived the battle, the families of the men killed in the fight, and more than 1,500 letters the sailors mailed to loved ones during their long months at sea, this story documents their life leading up to the bloody assault.

Ken Kessy’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - if you’ve seen the movie you’ll know how good it is. Told from the POV of a “mute” man living in an insane asylum, the story is is about a rebellious firefighter who challenges the head nurse’s authority. The story ultimately culminates in a shocking climax. I wish I could explain the story better, but it’s plot is so off the walls it’s hard to summarize it without leaving you confused.

Tim O’Brein’s The Things They Carried - about a platoon of American soldiers fighting on the ground in the Vietnam War. His third book about the war, it is based upon his experiences as a soldier in the 23rd Infantry Division. genuinely amazing book I would recommend to anyone interested in the Vietnam war. O’Brien gave a talk at my high school once too :)

Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night - fictional memoirs of Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American, who moved to Germany in 1923 at age 11, and later became a well-known playwright and Nazi propagandist. The story of the novel is narrated by Campbell himself, writing his memoirs while awaiting trial for war crimes in an Israeli prison.

God bless you boys for necroing my thread for me

Gonna go over the things I read since last time I posted

Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges is amazing. It is quite dense, and mostly consists of fictional academic texts discussing fictional books and is written in a very academic style. I fucking loved it, but you might not. It’s not a long read, and I’m almost certain you can find most of it online if you want to try giving it a shot.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck might be the best book I read all year. I think the internet sells it as a retelling of Cain and Abel, but that’s honestly just the last ~100 pages of a 600-page masterpiece. I absolutely adore historical fiction and all the characters are given so much care and detail and feel incredibly real. I cannot recommend this one enough.

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro is about an old Japanese painter who is struggling to come to terms with how post ww2 Japan treats his pre ww2 propaganda art. Kazuo Ishiguro is amazing at telling the reader exactly just what they need to know, and If you’ve enjoyed some of his other books you will probably enjoy this one too. The plot, however, is to me the least interesting one of his books that I have read.

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami is a short story collection that is very much just short Murakami stories. If you like them, you will like these too.

Alt dette kunne du få (You could had all of this) by Josefine Klougart is a book I got my mother for Christmas last year because its about someone growing up like 5km from where she grew up herself. It’s written incredibly well and is one of the rare examples of Danish actually sounding good. As far as I can tell it has yet to be released in any language that isn’t Danish, but if it is someday, keep an eye out.

Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami is a novel written by Murakami. If you like novels written by Murakami, you will like this one too.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan is about an anxious 50 yearold mother who struggles with climate change and social media and trying to connect with her early 20s son who likes to play video games and also about letting go of a dying parent. I would never buy this book but one of my classmates gave it to me because she couldn’t fit it in her suitcase. It was surprisingly well written.

Candide, or the Optimist by Voltaire is a book I bought in an English bookshop while visiting a friend in Paris because I asked one of the people that worked there what I should read if I had never read any French literature before. It’s surprisingly readable for a ~250 year old book. I wish I had taken some form of class on this book. It would probably be very fun to work with more.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami is the reason I haven’t read more books in the second half of the year. It is by far my least favourite Murakami novel I have ever read. It was also like 900 pages. I’m not really sure why I finished it. The female main character is written as a caricature of Murakami’s dream girl or some shit and makes so much of this book incredibly uncomfortable and not fun to read. I did it anyway for some reason. Don’t be me.

About the Size of the Universe by Jon Kalman Stefansson is incredibly well written. It’s a multi-generational story about a family in Iceland, but honestly Jon Kalman Stefansson just writes so gorgeously that there isn’t really too much more to say.

I just finished A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro like 2 hours ago and I enjoyed it very much. It is hard to talk about what this book is about because literally anything is a giant spoiler. Ishiguro is still very good at writing.

Next up on my shelf is The Plague by Albert Camus because I also picked it up in Paris. Besides that, I’m like 30 pages into The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt on my kindle. I don’t think I’ll be finishing anything before the new year.

I've been reading Going Postal by Terry Pratchett, and it's fr the first book I've enjoyed in like 3 yrs. The guy was a genius. He could stuff a joke and some pathos into every paragraph.

Highly recommend 1Q84

My most recent read is Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto. It was a very comfy read but I'm not sure how good I think it actually is, if anything I enjoyed it for the vibe.
Also finished Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark some time earlier this year and I thought it was a great, it's a popular science book about physics and his view of the universe. A slow read but I'd recommend it if you need to kill time and is interested in this stuff.

I love this thread. It's very short (like two pages short) but I'd highly recommend to anyone to take some time and read The Student by Anton Chekhov. I think it's my favorite thing I've ever read. Biggest thing I miss from college was the Chekhov short story collection I was allowed to keep for nearly two full years because the library stopped taking book returns due to COVID lol. Need to get another one now.

right now it's the personal memoirs of u.s. grant

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4367

because it's a bit crazy to me that we can just sit down and read what grant was thinking while he fought the entire civil war. like history behind the scenes

the bible :D

The Locked Tomb series has been my thing lately. I don't love all three currently available volumes equally, and don't entirely agree with the way the mysteries are structured all the time, but they're very rereadable because of said mystery structure, and the voice work in the audiobook is really fun. I'd probably recommend it to anyone who likes the idea of necromantic space lesbians, I guess.

heavily thinking about getting the entire witcher book series after i finish witcher 3 and its dlc

Damn, this thread is awesome. I never really enjoyed reading until the end of last year and now I can't stop.

If you love these two books I can definitely recommend Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro as well, for me it was at least as good as the other two books you mentioned. His ability to create really meaningful and unique connections between characters is also present in this book.

Warbreaker is a fun standalone (for now) book for other Mistborn/Stormlight Archives readers in this thread. It is a little less action-packed, but if you also like the political aspects in other Sanderson books it is a great read (and it has some small connections to Words of Radiance).

The Pianist is a beautiful WWII-related non-fiction book about the experience of a Jewish pianist living through the German occupation of Poland.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a great book if you like magical realism. I enjoyed it so much I ended up reading it in one sitting.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is a story about a boy on a mystical journey learning many lessons about life. This book definitely provides some different perspectives on life in general and it is also just a fun story to get sucked into.

I've been reading The World According to Color : A Cultural History by James Fox and it's been an absolute pleasure thus far. The book is split into chapters, each about a specific color and how it was used and its meaning altered throughout history. It's very readable (I don't have any formal art training and I never struggled) and its super interesting. Would recommend to anyone even slightly interested.

I recommend it! The games are IIRC not loved by the author, but are a continuation of the story after the novels. You wanna start with The Last Wish, which is a collection of short stories about Geralt's adventures, and sets up the plot of the main novels. If you like audiobooks, Peter Kenny does an AMAZING job.

Huge second on The Things They Carried, amazing book.

Penpal by Dathan Auerbach was a really haunting read, made me just kinda sit there after finishing it.

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica was unsettling but a solid read, fairly short iirc.

Tuesday's With Morrie by Mitch Albom was one of the most moving books I've ever read and really changed a lot of my outlook on life.

If you want a good classic read, Frankenstein was a really enjoyable one.

Philip K. Dick's Ubik was a really solid novel, has a lot of the classic sci-fi shit you see from him and had a really good ending.

I also have some good short sci-fi short stories, The Last Question by Isaac Asimov, Author C. Clarke's Nine Billion Names of God, Karen Joy Fowler's Standing Room Only, Pamela Zoline's Heat Death of the Universe

great taste. some of my favorite SF shorts I read this year

learning to be me - greg egan (an implant in your brain observes your every thought and learns how "be you")
the gentle seduction - marc stiegler (one of the best pieces of "post singularity" fiction ive seen)
it looks like you're trying to take over the world - gwern (the classic ai risk parable)

I also read and really liked the Three Body Problem (first contact made by cultural revolution china) books by cixin liu, and blindsight (first contact with very strange aliens) by peter watts.

for non-fiction im currently reading the vital question (research into the first multicellular life on earth) by nick lane and its really good and accessible (i have nothing after highschool biology)

Absolutely everyone should read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig.

Unfortunately it is also one of the most boring books I've ever read even though it is one of the books with the most impact on how I view the world. If you're more inclined to read fiction Cormac McCarthy is a brilliant author who just released a new book but I would tell you to read No Country for Old Men. Finally if you truly have nothing but time to sink and are particularly fond of statistics Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature definitely helped cure me of some of my pessimistic tendencies when I read it in high school like a loser with no friends.

Ever read Open by Andre Agassi? 8 Grand Slams and an Olympic Gold all lay under his belt, along with a gripping tale about the pains of drug addiction, bad coaches, and an oddly-mixed relationship for the game. A great read, especially if you want to get a feel for the comp scene in other sports - in this case, the loneliest

the things they carried struck me as a worse version of dispatches by michael herr