Literature book recommendations, anyone?

[soapteeth]

between taking art commissions, i've had some spare time on my hands, and i'm in dire need of some new books to read. my favourite book i've read so far has been ken kesey's "one flew over the cuckoo's nest," but i haven't found anything that's sufficiently filled that void. it was such a good book! nothing else i've read has been able to come close to hitting the bar that book has set, lmao.

so, any good books i ought to read?

 

[kevintheradioguy]

I can always advice Colleen McCullough's detective Delmonico series. On, Off; Too Many Murders; Naked Cruelty; The Prodigal Son; Sins of the Flesh - in that order.

 

[Rinasako]

Well, I have a fresh favourite what I finished to read on the last week. It's a fantasy book series what is really long actually, but maybe it could happen that you could try it.
The title of it 'The Kingkiller chronicle' and the author is Patrick Rothfuss.

One more author is come into my mind now: William Golding.

That's all at the moment,but I read lots of books, so it's possible that I will bring more ideas to you later...
Hope you will find something what you will like!

 

[TarantulaHawk]

Here’s a list of books I have in my own personal “library” (lmao)! I don’t know your reading level, so some of these are a shot in the dark and might be far below/above your level. But regardless of where you sit, they are all some of my favorite books/book series’ ever.

— Bless the Child, Cathy Cash Spellman
— Memnoch the Devil, Anne Rice
— The White Fox, James Bartholomew
— Wild Magic (The Immortals Series), Tamora Pierce
— It Gets Worse, Shane Dawson
— Binge, Tyler Oakley
— Skulduggery Pleasant (Series) Derek Landy
— Malice (Prequel, One Sequel), Chris Wooding

 

[VeraKelland]

So if you liked Kesey, you'll want to explore some other late-20th century counterculture authors. I think a great one to start with is Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of my favorite books of all time, as is Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. (He titles a lot of his work "fear and loathing" but it's not a series or anything each book is perfectly readable on its own) If you want a good sample of Thompson's writing, check out this article he wrote on the Kentucky Derby.

A slightly more ambitious recommendation is William Burroughs, and there's really no "good" place to start with him so you might as well just pick up Naked Lunch. It's not really a book you read in the traditional sense, what I did is just flipped around until I found an interesting passage and read from there. It's all written in a very "stream of consciousness" style, so you kinda just gotta go with the flow and do what works for you.

Some other good recommendations would be early cyberpunk stuff. Neuromancer by William Gibson and The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker are classics. My personal favorite early cyberpunk book is Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling.

The last two recs I'll give you for now are similar to Cuckoo's Nest in a "first person societal critique" sense. The first is Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky. It's about a Russian man living in a kind of self-imposed urban exile airing his complaints about the world. The second is The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. This one is a pretty tough read, but well worth it imo. It, like all of Faulkner's work, tackles the psychology of the American South and all the racism and abuse that went on there.

Anyway I'm obviously pretty into this stuff so if you want more recs or just want to talk books, PM me for sure.