Asklemmy

Only ever met one other persons who had ever even heard of her but I have a particular love for the works of Jaqueline Carey. The Sundering duology is gorgeous moral greyness with epic fantasy scale and yet personal characterization. The Kushiel series (the parts I have read so far) is the intertwining of political thriller, historical fiction, magical realism, BDSM romance, and again, has both epic scale plot and personal characters. I recommend the Sundering to everyone and Kushiel's Dart to anyone old enough their mother won't come around and attack me for exposing their son/daughter to the sexual parts of the book. There are others but those ones always come to mind when I see/hear this question.

Salman Rushdie writes great novels.

Since douglas adams was mentioned a few times, I also highly recommend anything by P.G. Wodehouse if british humor is something you want to get into...

I'm currently re-reading Jostein Gaarder with my kids, also a great read I think.

I would say Dune couple years ago. But given how this whole craze around the movies happen I'm not so sure anymore. Haven't seen them, scared doing so. I hated 80s Lynch one, because it felt retarded compared to the book and I don't want to feel this again.

Apart from Dune, there are plenty more. Older works of Clarke or Asimov for example, or most of Strugacky brothers works I've read were amazing too.

The adventures of the Stainless Steel rat.

I've just starting getting into a bit of russian/eastern europe scifi. "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin is incredible if you haven't read it. It is clearly the main inspiration for 1984, but just so much better. Then, just about any book by Stanislaw Lem is great. Solaris is probably the easiest to find and a pretty good more hard-ish sci-fi book, but I gotta recommend "Futurological Congress". It's hilarious! Reads like a Douglas Adams book, with an interesting idea at its core. So I think those are my most recent "favorite" books for the moment.

So many, but this one has always fascinated me.

The Secret Life of Plants (1973)

Fiction: The Lord of the Rings, it's a basic answer but it's just so good.

Non-Fiction: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

I loved Seven Eves as a whole, but the novella AR the end drops in quality significantly imo. Still very worth the read.

Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is about the horrors (and occassionally the beauty) of being an outcast in modern-day Delhi. Another of Roy's works is The Briefing, a short story in the form of a speech given by a guerilla leader to their followers as they are about to attack a fortress in the Alps.

I used to read fiction mysteries as a teenager. In adult life I thought reading for leisure "wasn't for me". Tried some popular stuff (Davinci code, Harry Potter, etc) and hared it. Tried other universally recommended books like Catch 22 and Hitchhikers guide and couldn't get through them and found them boring as sin. Thought this meant I just don't like reading. Turns out non-fiction is my jam. So 2 of the best books for me have been:

Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman

Criminal: The Truth About Why People Do Bad Things - Tom Gash

“Revelation Space” from Alastair Reynolds: a very solid hard science fiction space opera.

“Neuromancer” from William Gibson: the seminal cyberpunk novel where the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

“Destination: Void” from Frank Herbert: starts inside a space ship, a bit dark.

Of all time, a single book that's not part of a series, I still gotta go with Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein), or Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut)

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Kind of a weird one because it’s technically incomplete, assembled by his longtime editor and his wife from materials going back to the 90s. I think it could’ve been his best work, even though I’ve always held that his nonfiction is superior.

Tough to answer but currently;

• The Words We Keep.
• The Book Thief.
• Before The Coffee Gets Cold.
• 1984
• The Midnight Library.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

My single favourite book is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

Honourable mentions to:

• Catch-22 - Heller
• Slaughterhouse 5 - Vonnegut
• To the Lighthouse - Woolf
• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Garcia Marquez
• The Windup Bird Chronicle - Murakami
• Pride and Prejudice - Austin
• Burr - Vidal
• Brave New World - Huxley
• The Handmaid's Tale - Atwood
• Hitchhikercs Guide to the Galaxy - Adams

Currently reading, and enjoying, Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 🙂

EDIT - also head over to !Books@lemmy.world for lots of chat and more recommendations

The Fifth Season (first book in the Broken Earth trilogy) by N.K. Jemisin. It's fantasy but with pretty logical boundries on the supernatural elements. I love the writing, plot, character development, and world-building.

Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick

floowed by

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

I'm not an avid reader (anymore) and can't even tell you any favorites. But since you've mentioned liking horror and Russian authors: are you aware of Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch series?

I guess it's more fantasy than horror, and probably not like any of the Russian literature classics, but I just figured you might enjoy it.

Anything by Emma St John Mandel. I started with The Singers Gun, but probably enjoyed Station Eleven most. It was made into a series by HBO - I'm in "the book was better" camp. The Glass Hotel is also good, and Sea of Tranquility. A quirk is that various characters pop up or are referenced in different novels.

China Mieville is another writer I like a lot. I read most of his steampunk novels - Perdido Street Station and The Scar stand out. But my favourite was Embassytown, which is basically about language.

Technically not one book, but uhh... one/two book series: Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson.

Fiction: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Nonfiction: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

fiction: the lord of the rings cycle and watership down

non-fiction: a paradise built in hell by rebecca solnit