imagine an alien who could read english really well got dropped on earth
 

and tell me what books you'd recommend to them.

because i want to start reading and i'm woefully under-read

i started with portrait of the artist as a young man. which i am enjoying very much.

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser is a real page turner. Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, too.

You strictly going for fiction?

I really enjoyed reading The God of Small Things, Confederacy of Dunces, and Faust

This inspired me to reread Candide, because I have completely forgotten what it is about. Almost halfway through it. :)

thanks. not necessarily but mostly, yes. i need something to engage my creativity, not feel like i'm studying

thanks both of you

Finnegans Wake

Some of my all time faves before my current job sapped all joy from the act of reading:

Enormous Changes At the Last Minute - Grace Paley
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
2666 - Roberto Bolaño

Light in August, by William Faulkner
The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson (the collection, not just the story)
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Super good suggestion. I was thinking of throwing in a British country house novel.

I've found every Ishiguro I've read to be a goddamn delight, that one and Never Let Me Go in particular. I've never done this before or since, but when I got to the end of Never I paused, went back to the first page, and started over. And then again.

Please give Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses a go.

I would also highly recommend Adolfo Bioy Casares' The Invention of Morel. Please let me know if you (or [almost] anybody else) would like a digital copy.

The Man Who Was Thursday
The God Of Small Things
A People's History of the United States
The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Yes, thanks for reminding me.

For the poor sap who doesn't fall under [almost]:

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/re...o-bioy-casares

ok, I made a text file. I'm going to start with:

An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser

Hunchback of Notre Dame

and i will go through others from there, see what i want to explore

going to get hard copies of them, dont really want to go ebook

keep suggestions coming please

i remember reading the lottery story, prob will check out the whole book once i'm done with one of the first two

i don't expect to be going voraciously through these, 30min-1 hour a night, so prob a few weeks each, longer if they are difficult or long. who knows, may get sucked in though

Eulogy probably has some good suggestions too.

Mine are all going to be lame. I’m going to go through my shelves tonight to look for some bangers.

ur dad's a banger

Yeah he's a qt lil sweet tart.

thanks you guys i really appreciate the recommendations, fo shizzle

I am very ashamed of how little I’ve read post schooling. Could maybe blame a couple years on burnout but uh. Not anymore. Will think about this though. It’s to the point where I don’t even remember the names of some of the suggestions that came to mind right away : (

The large majority of these books weren't originally written in English, but I digress

Shadow of the Wind was originally in Spanish. A married French guy I was seeing (his name was Yves...classic!) when I was 23 gave me his copy, which sucks cause I don't want to tie anything good to that time in my life. But hey, it's a great book.

Saying "Yves and Lauren" fairly quickly is actually a pretty handy pronunciation guide.

1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
It's 3 books but worth it!

100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

Dracula - Bram Stoker

I need to read 100 Years. Read Midnight's Children last year and I want more stuff like that.

Love in the Time of Cholera is better than 100 years imo

Less characters to keep track of and more heartfelt

100 Years is my #1 best human book of all time, I haven’t read the last 10 pages because I’ve saved it to do it on my deathbed.

I loved Love in a Time or Cholera...but Chronicle of a Death Foretold is kind of like my fan favourite or something. I remember feeling this weird sense of triumph at the end of it, vicariously, something like “wow, you did it”

Though, I am in ilp’s camp here, if the aliens for some reason read English, it is a bit of a sad move to offer up translations

But how much of the ‘classic’ U.S. canon have you read reprise?
If aliens had read nothing, I would suggest stuff like

On the Road - Jack Kerouac
The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

But presumably you’ve read that stuff reprise??

only read the catcher in the rye. which, btw, i hate.

no i have not read most american classic canon because i am a pleb and basically didnt go to high school, too busy moving away with creeps

A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway

That’s definitely fair enough...I think we often hate “classics” from our own part of the world - I certainly do. I hate most NZ prose. You can give up after a chapter and at least you’ve given it a chance...I’ve done that on many occasions with supposedly amazing classics (like Ulysses, for example) because life is too short to read books I don’t like, and I’ve had to force myself to do it anyway, too many times, as part of my supposed education

Though one of these years I’m going to do what my Dad did, and sign up for a “read Ulysses in a year” email service and just truck on through it, because he said it was definitely worth it and we have similar tastes when it comes to “classics”

Some of my faves
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
The Kitchen God’s Wife - Amy Tan
The Picture of Dorian Grey - Oscar Wilde
The Road to Wigan Pier, also Animal Farm (didn’t get into 1984) - George Orwell

If you’ve never tried the genre before, my favourite murder mystery/procedural series is Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware books (he’s a psychologist turned crime writer so he creates quite satisfying villains), but I also really enjoyed PD James’ Adam Dalgliesh (lots of people find her writing really dated and naff but I like it).

mods pls ban vixnix


thank u

i'd rather eat my own ballsack than read Ulysses


for real

Yeah I found it very hard going

But I didn’t mind Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and reprise said she was enjoying it

So maybe it would be good to Give Joyce a chance

I read Portrait! It took (whallah!) me two tries but I did it. And I'm happy I did. Obviously the dude had a megalothonal mind.

Hi alien, big fan

I recommend A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
(please take me with you)

Would you consider Portrait to be a fairly difficult read, guys? I mean it's not terribly hard but I can't tell if I'm stupid/rusty or this shit is complex. And his lack of fucking commas, good god. I know eventually he just says fuck punctuation completely but jesus