/lit/Book Suggestions

Book suggestions from /lit/, sorted by author's last name.

A

Adams, Douglas

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• The Dark Tea-Time of the Soul as well as Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency are good if you like HHGTTG and a are a little more clever

Adorno, Theodor

Possibly the most genius lovely guy in recent years. Along with this dude called Horkheimer (who we don't talk about) he wrote "Dialectic of Enlightenment" which is an absolutely spectacular work on culture. Not advised if you have ADHD or are otherwise retarded - he believes 'clarity' and 'easy reading' are for little girls. Literally.

• The Culture Industry

(good too)

Aesop

• Fables

(That one about the crow always comes to mind when I fuck up with my tortellini and get boiling water all over my hands. Read it, Aesop is wise as shit.) Highly recommended.

Aizenberg, Edna

• Borges and His Successors. The Borgian Impact on Literature and the Arts

Althusser, Louis

• Lenin and Other Essays

http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/LPOE70ii.html (Unfortunately strangled his wife. He was so cool.)

Aristotle

• Nicomachean Ethics
• Poetics
• Rhetoric

(Both worth reading if you're dryer than a Saharan scorpion's vagina - of immense import to the history of literature, but incredibly, phenomenally boring.)

Atwood, Margaret

• The Handmaid's Tale
• The Edible Woman

(Feminist lit, pretty accessible for any reading level)

Ayer, A. J.

• Language, Truth, and Logic

(Oh dear god, unless you're a self-harmer...)

B

Bahktin, Mikhail

Discourse in the Novel (Not really readable unless you're already fairly grounded in structuralist theory. Writes with loads of coinages and obscure words. If you can hack it, he's brilliant). (Pompous continental pseudery read exclusively by beret-wearing, middle-class undergraduate prats who will soon apply their knowledge of semiotics and literary theory to the application form at their local unemployment office)

Bolaño, Roberto

• 2666
• The Savage Detectives

Borges, Jorge Luis

• The Total Library: Non-fiction, 1922-1986
• Collected Fictions
• Borges: Selected Poems

Boyle, T. Coraghessan

(he basically was a full hard on hippie, did all kinds of drugs (including one year of heroin). his stories are full of dark humor and twists to the bad)

• The Tortilla Curtain (damn beaners! no seriously its great!)
• Stories (collection of short stories. must reads: bloodfall, descent of man, mexico)

Benjamin, Walter

(Best pronounced with a faggy german accent, so it comes out as Valter Benyameen) Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. (Palls with Adorno, another lovely lovely chap.)

Bulgakov, Mikhail

• The Master and Margarita

Bukowski, Charles

• Post Office
• Ham On Rye
• Tales of Ordinary Madness

Bryson, Bill

• A Short History of Nearly Everything

C

Calvino, Italo

• If On a Winter's Night a Traveler
• Invisible Cities

Camus, Albert

• Fiction:
  • The Stranger
  • The Plague
• Non-Fiction:
  • The Rebel
  • The Myth of Sisyphus

Carroll, Lewis

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Cervantes, Miguel de

• Don Quixote

Cixous, Helene

(Wrote some plays, and some good poetry. Also writing guidebooks.)

Chaucer, Geofrey

UP IN THIS BITCH!

• The Canterbury Tales

(One of those things that the more you read the more you realize how genius this guy is.)

Colbert, Stephen

• I Am America (And So Can You)

Conrad, Joseph

• Heart of Darkness
• The Secret Sharer
• Nostromo

Conroy, Pat

• The Great Santini

Cortazar, Julio

• Blow-Up and Other Stories
• Hopscotch

D

Danielewski, Mark Z.

• House of Leaves

This book is like training wheels for the writings of Borges and Robert Anton Wilson. (And I mean that in a good way.)

Dante

• The Divine Comedy

DeLillo, Don

• White Noise

Dick, Philip K

• A Scanner Darkly
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
• Flow My Tears the Policeman Said

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

• Notes from the Underground
• Crime and Punishment
• The Brothers Karamazov
• The Idiot

E

Eco, Umberto

• The Name of The Rose.
• Foucault's Pendulum

Ellis, Bret Easton

• American Psycho
• Less Than Zero
• Rules of Attraction
• Glamorama

Ende, Michael

• The Neverending Story
• Momo

F

Faulkner, William

• Absalom! Absalom!
• The Sound and the Fury

I found this one slightly challenging, but very rewarding. The first 90 pages or so are told from the perspective of a full-retard who jumps all over the place time-wise. The reader can get a rough idea of the time based on the servant who's watching him: Versh - 1900-ish when Benji is 3-5 T.P. 1905-1912 when Benji is 15-ish Luster - Present when Benji is 33. Each time italics are incorporated Benji is changing his train of thought.

• As I Lay Dying

Feynman, Richard

• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
• Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
• The Character of Physical Law

Flaubert, Gustave

• Madame Bovary
• Salammb

Foucault, Michel

(If more people understood the carceral, I'd be a happy man indeed.)

Foster Wallace, David

(I think that's how it goes, anyhow. I don't like him, but I have friends who do.)

• Infinite Jest
• Oblivion

G

Gibran, Khalil

• The Prophet
• The Garden of The Prophet

Gibson, William

• Neuromancer

God

• The Bible
• The Epic of Gilgamesh?
• The Qur'an

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von

• The Sorrows of Young Werther

(Banned for the wrong reasons).

• Faust

H

Hamsun, Knut

• Hunger

Herbert, Frank

• Dune (series)

Herodotus

(Easily the most entertaining historian ever. Remains skeptical, but dutifully reports the possible -and plausible- existence of flying snakes, ants the size of dogs that mine gold, phoenixes, and so on. Also wrote the history of a king who went around putting up pillars embellished with vaginas on the lands of his defeated enemies).

Heller, Joseph

• Catch-22

Hemingway, Ernest

• A Farewell to Arms
• The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (if you can get over those fucking thous and thines and the weird ass grammar)

Hesse, Hermann

• Siddharta
• Steppenwolf
• Journey To The East

Homer

• Iliad
• Odyssey

Hume, David

• An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding

Huxley, Aldous

• The Doors of Perception
• Brave New World

J

Jung, Carl Gustav

• Synchronicity as "An Acausal Connecting Principle"a

Joyce, James

• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Ulysses (Don't actually try to read this one [if you have ADHD and find cooking a microwave burger a test of patience], though.)

K

Kafka, Franz

• The Trial
• The Castle
• The Metamorphosis

(The short stories are excellent, and contain a wealth of psychological and philosophical insight. [they will make you sound clever and get you laid])

Kaufmann, Walter A.

• Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
• On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo

Kharms, Daniil Ivanovich

• Incidences (Brilliant surrealist short stories)

Kierkegaard, Søren

• Fear and Trembling
• The Concept of Angst

King, Stephen

• It
• The Stand
• The Dark Tower (books 1-4)

L

Lispector, Clarice

(Latin American feminist author)

Lovecraft, H.P.

• The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre

Lowry, Malcom

• Under the Volcano

M

Machiavelli, Niccolo

• The Prince

Mallarmé, Stéphane

• Selected Poetry and Prose

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

• One Hundred Years of Solitude

(OK, fine, it's not super-literary. But I like it. It's good).

Marx, Karl

• Capital (also known as Das Kapital, a tough but rewarding read)
• The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Meyer, Stephanie

Just kidding. What a dumb cunt.

Milton, John

• Paradise Lost

Murakami, Haruki

• 1Q84
• Kafka on the Shore
• South of the Border, West of the Sun
• The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

N

Nabokov, Vladimir

• Pale Fire
• Lolita

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm

• The Birth of Tragedy
• Human, All Too Human
• The Dawn
• The Gay Science
• Beyond Good and Evil
• On the Genealogy of Morality
• Twilight of the Idols

(This is probably his best and most overlooked work - he basically sets out the kernel of post-structuralist thought.)

• The Antichrist
• Ecce Homo

O

Orwell, George

• 1984
• Animal Farm (Or, listen to Animals by Pink Floyd.)
• Down and Out In Paris and London
• Homage to Catalonia
• Essays (Penguin Modern Classics)

Ovid

(He's officially called "Publius Ovidius Naso", but that's well pretentious, so Ovid it is). Metamorphoses Tristia

P

Plath, Sylvia

• The Bell Jar

Plato

• Republic
• Apologie of Socrates

Plutarch

• Lives

Poe, Edgar Allen

• Complete Tales and Poems

Pynchon, Thomas

• The Crying of Lot 49

(This is probably the best place to start with Pynchon. Although it's less than 200 pages, it is very dense.)

• V.
• Gravity's Rainbow

Q

Quine, Willard van Orman

• From a Logical Point of View

R

Remarque, Erich Maria

• All Quiet on the Western Front

Roberts, J. M.

• The New Penguin History of the World

Rochefoucauld, François de La

• Maxims

Rulfo, Juan

• Pedro Pramo - Magical realism at its best, this book oozes trippy shit. If you like Marquez, this is better.

S

Sabato, Ernesto

• The Tunnel
• On Heroes and Tombs

Shakespeare, William

he wrote some plays. SHAKESPEARE GOT TO GET PAID, SON.

Salinger J.D.

• The Catcher in The Rye

T

Takami, Koushun

• Battle Royale

(A good, light read. Lots of action.)

Thompson, Hunter S.

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
• Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
• The Great Shark Hunt

(It's commonly accepted that Hunter's output after the 1970s is awful trash)

Tolkien, J.R.R.

• The Hobbit
• Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Tolstoy, Leo

• Anna Karenina
• War and Peace

Tool, John Kennedy

• A Confederacy of Dunces

V

Vidal, Gore

The City and the Pillar Lincoln Burr

United States: Essays, 1952-92

Virgil

• Aeneid

Vonnegut, Kurt

• Slaughterhouse-Five
• Cat's Cradle
• Breakfast of Champions

A great black satirical humor only possible when your mother commits suicide on Mother's Day.

W

Welsh, Irving

• Trainspotting

(He also wrote a whole load of other books in the same Edinburgh slang, including 'Filth', which has a tapeworm as a pivotal character. Needless to say, they're all horrible.

Wilson, Robert Anton & Shea, Robert

• The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Woolf, Virginia

• Mrs Dalloway

Y

Yerofeyev, Venedict

• Moscow-Petushki

Z

Zamyatin, Yevgeny

• We

(one of the originators of the dystopian genre)

Zizek, Slavoj

• First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

Zola, Emile

The whole Rougon-Macquart thing is awesome, and in particular:

• L'Assomoir
• L'Oeuvre
• La Terre

Astronomy, Cosmos

• Carl Sagan's Cosmos

Economics, Business, Stocks

• Free to Choose by Milton Friedman

Geography

• Geographies of Globalization by Warwick Murray

Math, general

• What is Mathematics? By Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins

Philosophy

• Bertrand Russel's The Problems of Philosophy
• Antonio Demasio's Self Comes To Mind
• Ramachandran's A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness
• Joshua Foer's Moonwalking With Einstein
• Conversations On Consciousness, edited by Susan Blackmore
• Wittgenstein (General Subjet)* Nihilism (General Subject)
• Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Descartes, Machevelli. Look these fellas up and find their work.
• http://classics.mit.edu/Browse/browse-Plato.html
• http://classics.mit.edu/Browse/browse-Aristotle.html