Asklemmy

Lots of great suggestions involving story craft and the like, so I'll target the "religious hangups" bit with a couple non-fiction books:

• Sentience by Nicholas Humphrey (great to get a perspective on consciousness and sentience that isn't marred with religious doctrine)

• Determined by Robert Sapolsky (a primatologist with a knack for getting you comfortable with the notion that we don't have as free a will as religion tells us)

And just to include a bit of fiction:

• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (about life as we know it, or maybe as we don't)

• Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (deals with overwritten cultures. Also dragons.)

a few books that I found enjoyable recently

• Doors of Sleep
• The City and the Stars
• The Windup Girl
• Consider Phlebas
• A Scanner Darkly
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects
• The Mountain in the Sea

For nonfiction I would recommend books about media criticism and history. Manufacturing consent and The Jakarta Method, for example. These can help set you up for further reading. For media criticism, it will help you recognize when to keep reading about the people that journalists talk to and who they don't, why they are writing this article rather than that one, and identify others that take a media critical approach, as they are good people to read. For history, I think it is good to read widely and critically. We are not taught particularly thorough or accurate history in school. Much is left out or glossed over with selective narratives. For example, I was taught that the US Civil War was about states' rights, not slavery, because the text was from Texas and my teacher taught from the book. This was, of course, nonsense. A People's History of The United States is a pretty good way to start out if you want to start with US history. That might be better than The Jakarta Method, actually.

For fiction, it really depends on what you enjoy! What kinds of stories or topics do you find most interesting?

All of HP Lovecraft's stories.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen

Most things by Henry James

James Joyce has a good catalogue, I recommend treating a book like the Odyssey as a college course and reading prerequisite reading such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the original Odyssey (and it's precursor the Iliad).

This should be a good years worth on its own!

im a piers anthoy fan and his incarnation of immortality series is his known magnus opa but the geodesy serries is the real one. foundation was isaac asimovs but he ends up sorta combining a bunch of his work into all one mega world. his ip is really undervalued. nine princes of amber for zelazny. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever for donaldson. river of the dancing gods is neat. oh there are many really

The Brothers Lionheart, by Astrid Lindgren is one of my childhood favourites. Originally Swedish but has been translated into English.

The Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt another childhood fav., it has been translated from Dutch. Actually, anything by Dragt I loved, but not sure which have translations or not.

In terms of adult fiction, I was hooked on Stig Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series (he only wrote the first 3 though).

Someone mentioned Kurt Vonnegut; I recommend the one I've read of his: Slaughterhouse 5.

The Circle still gives me pause more than 5 years later. It's by Dave Eggers.

I’ve always struggled to find a good book to read. I love having books read to me, but to pick one up myself has always been a struggle.

So when I say I’ve love the Ascendance of a Bookworm series, know that this is one of maybe 2 or 3 series I actually read. It’s a fantasy story about one little girls dream of trying to read books in a world without books. The premise is silly on paper, but the world building and characters are so detailed and flushed out that I’ve gotten sucked in and read throughout the whole series multiple times.

The novels just finished the main series with Part 5 Volume 12, there an anime of good to mixed quality, and a manga too. Tips for new readers is to watch the anime before reading as Part 1 is not as smooth as the rest.

There is also a lemmy server for discussions [email protected]

If you've already read a lot of books, you should give If On A Winter's Night A Traveller a go.

Fifty Shades Of Grey

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan. Kalki by Gore Vidal. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley. Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Atonement by Ian McEwan. Being Dead by Jim Crace.

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