Asklemmy

43750 readers

1458 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What books do you consider must reads? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

100 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So basically I was unschooled, and the amount of books I've read in my life is embarrassingly low. It was never emforced like in a school, and with my family's religious hangups, I never tried getting into new things because I never knew what would be deemed "offensive".

But I'm always interested when I hear people talk about both storycraft and also literary criticism, so I want to take an earnest stab at getting into books.

No real criteria, I don't know what I like so I can't tell you what I'm looking for, other than it needs to be in English or have an English translation. Just wanna know what y'all think would make good or important reading.

ETA holy shit thanks for all the suggestions! Definitely gonna make a list

ETA if I reply extremely late it's because it took me this long to get a library card in my new locale.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein is one the books I read during my formative years that I still think about a lot.

If you like graphic novels, The Sandman by Neil Gaiman is fantastic. Great writing and great artwork.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Funny. I absolutely hated Stranger in a Strange Land. It felt like a 14-year-old boy's fantasy/im14andiamsmart. Pretentious and masturbatory.

Maybe I would have loved it if I read it when I was 14 instead of when I was something like 22.

It's actually my go-to example for a book that I dislike. I think it's the only book I've really actually hated. I would have just thought it was tripe if it hadn't taken such a wonderful title away. Now there will never be a good book with that fantastic title.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Stranger has a point where you can feel in your body the whiplash of the change in tone. After the middle point Heinlein was blocked for years, and when he continued the result was grotesque.

When you start reading dialog about what happens in Heaven, when the story started as proper sf, you know that the author lost the plot (literally and figuratively).

load more comments (1 replies)