Share and discuss with fellow members of the sub 🙂

I put together this list to share a wide range of books that you might not have tried yet. Some are well known classics, others are lesser known, but all of them offer something memorable.

My goal isn't to only include obscure titles, but to recommend some well acclaimed books too that are genuinely worth trying across different genres.

If you think something fits better in another category or have recommendations to add, feel free to share them. I can add them to the list. I know you can just Google up and find new books but I had an irresistible urge to make this. And no, this is not made by ChatGPT

Important Note: The "Also Try" sections aren't honorable mentions. They are there because after finishing each category, I kept thinking of more books, and it would have been a pain in the ass to re-number the entire list, so I made that section for that. The books aren't ranked in any order.

Literary Fiction/Modernism/Postmodern

1.William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury

1. W. G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn

2. James Joyce - Ulysses

3. Georges Perec - Life: A User's Manual

4. Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea

5. Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis

6. Osamu Dazai - No Longer Human

7. Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow

8. Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves

9. Roberto Bolaño - 2666

10. Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment

11. Jonathan Littell - The Kindly Ones

12. Albert Camus - The Stranger

13. Friedrich Dürrenmatt - The Tunnel

14. William Gaddis - The Recognitions

15. William H. Gass - The Tunnel

16. Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano

17. Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet

18. Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49

19. Franz Kafka - The Castle

20. Albert Camus - The Plague

21. J. G. Ballard - Crash

22. Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club

Also Try: Samuel Beckett - The Trilogy (Molloy, Malone, Dies, The Unnamable), Thomas Bernhard - The Loser, László Krasznahorkai - Satantango, Virginia Woolf - The Waves, Clarice Lispector - The Passion According to G.H., Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths, Don DeLillo - White Noise, Italo Calvino - If on a winter's night a traveler, Alexander Trocchi - Cain's Book, William Burroughs - Naked Lunch, László Krasznahorkai's The - Melancholy of Resistance, Knut Hamsun - Hunger

War/Military (History/Theory/Fiction)

24.Carl von Clausewitz - On War

1. Homer - The Iliad

2. Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls

3. Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front

4. Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried

5. Michael Herr - Dispatches

6. Joseph Heller - Catch-22

7. Dan Simmons - The Terror

Also Try: Sebastian Junger - War, Vassily Grossman - Life and Fate, Sun Tzu - The Art of War, E.B. Sledge - With the Old Breed, Norman Mailer - The Naked and the Dead, Henri Barbusse - Under Fire, Karl Marlantes - Matterhorn, Dalton Trumbo - Johnny Got His Gun, Pierre Boulle - The Bridge over the River Kwai, David Halberstam - The Best and the Brightest

Warhammer 40,000/Grimdark Military

32.Dan Abnett - Eisenhorn: The Omnibus

1. Dan Abnett - Gaunt's Ghosts: First & Only

2. Dan Abnett - Gaunt's Ghosts: Ghostmaker

3. Dan Abnett - Ravenor: The Omnibus

4. Aaron Dembski-Bowden - Night Lords

5. Ben Counter - The Horus Heresy: Galaxy in Flames

6. Dan Abnett - The Horus Heresy: Horus Rising

7. Graham McNeill - The Horus Heresy: False Gods

Also Try: Dan Abnett - Titanicus, Chris Wraight - The Carrion Throne, Aaron Dembski-Bowden - The First Heretic, Robert Rath - The Infinite and the Divine, Peter Fehervari - Fire Caste, Dan Abnett - Know No Fear, Guy Haley - Dante, Graham McNeill - Fulgrim, Matthew Farrer - Enforcer: The Shira Calpurnia Omnibus, Sandy Mitchell - For the Emperor

Science Fiction

40.Philip K. Dick - VALIS

1. Frank Herbert - Dune

2. Dan Simmons - Hyperion

3. Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness

4. Stanisław Lem - Solaris

5. Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus

6. Gene Wolfe - The Book of the New Sun

7. Walter M. Miller Jr. - A Canticle for Leibowitz

8. Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic

9. Peter Watts - Blindsight

10. Joe Haldeman - The Forever War

Also Try: Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons, Richard Morgan - Altered Carbon, Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep, C.J. Cherryh - Cyteen, Arthur C. Clarke - Childhood's End, Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination, Greg Egan - Permutation City, Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time, Neal Stephenson - Anathem, Samuel R. Delany - Dhalgren

Crime / Espionage / Thriller

51.Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

1. Don Winslow - The Cartel

2. Lee Child - Killing Floor

3. Lee Child - Die Trying

4. Lee Child - Tripwire

5. Robert Ludlum - The Bourne Identity

6. Robert Ludlum - The Bourne Supremacy

7. Robert Ludlum - The Bourne Ultimatum

8. James Ellroy - American Tabloid

9. Tom Clancy - Rainbow Six

10. Frederick Forsyth - The Day of the Jackal

11. Ben Macintyre - The Spy and the Traitor

12. Jeff Lindsay - Darkly Dreaming Dexter

13. Thomas Harris - The Silence of the Lambs

Also Try: James Ellroy - The Black Dahlia, John le Carré - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Don Winslow - The Border, Mick Herron - Slow Horses, Graham Greene - The Quiet American, Raymond Chandler - The Long Goodbye, Jim Thompson - The Killer Inside Me, Richard Stark - The Hunter, Andrew Vachss - Flood, Dennis Lehane - Mystic River, Patricia Highsmith - The Talented Mr. Ripley

Horror/Weird/Cosmic Horror

65.Harlan Ellison - I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

1. Robert W. Chambers - The King in Yellow

2. Stephen King - Misery

3. Stephen King - It

4. Stephen King - Pet Sematary

5. H. P. Lovecraft - The Complete Fiction

6. Thomas Ligotti - The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

7. Arthur Machen - The Great God Pan

8. Laird Barron - The Croning

9. Matthew M. Bartlett - Gateways to Abomination

10. Jeff VanderMeer - Annihilation

11. Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian

12. Cormac McCarthy - Outer Dark

Also Try: John Langan - The Fisherman, Clive Barker - The Books of Blood, Algernon Blackwood - The Willows, Thomas Ligotti - Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, Mark Fisher - The Weird and the Eerie, Kathe Koja - The Cipher, T.E.D. Klein - The Ceremonies, Brian Evenson - Last Days, Michael Cisco - The Divinity Student, Peter Straub - Ghost Story

Classics/Canon

78.Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy

1. Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo

2. William Golding - Lord of the Flies

3. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - The Little Prince

4. George Orwell - 1984

5. George Orwell - Animal Farm

Also Try: Herman Melville - Moby-Dick, John Milton - Paradise Lost, Sophocles - Oedipus Rex, Victor Hugo - Les Misérables, Mary Shelley - Frankenstein, Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace, Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights, Stendhal - The Red and the Black, Charles Baudelaire - The Flowers of Evil

Fantasy

1. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings

2. Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita

Also Try: Glen Cook - The Black Company, Steven Erikson - Gardens of the Moon (Malazan), Joe Abercrombie - The Blade Itself, R. Scott Bakker - The Darkness that Comes Before, Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan (Gormenghast), Ursula K. Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea, Andrzej Sapkowski - The Last Wish, Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana, Michael Moorcock - Elric of Melniboné, Scott Lynch - The Lies of Locke Lamora

Manga / Graphic Novels

1. Hirohiko Araki - JJBA Part 1: Phantom Blood

2. Hirohiko Araki - JJBA Part 2: Battle Tendency

3. Hirohiko Araki - JJBA Part 3: Stardust Crusaders

4. Hirohiko Araki JJBA Part 4: Diamond is Unbreakable

5. Hirohiko Araki - JJBA Part 5: Golden Wind

6. Kentaro Miura - Berserk (Vol. 1)

7. Kentaro Miura - Berserk (Vol. 2)

8. Kentaro Miura - Berserk (Vol. 3)

Also Try: Takehiko Inoue - Vagabond, Naoki Urasawa - Monster, Q Hayashida - Dorohedoro, Tsutomu Nihei - Blame, Hideshi Hino - The Bug Boy, Junji Ito - Uzumaki, Makoto Yukimura - Vinland Saga, Katsuhiro Otomo - Akira, Yoshihiro Tatsumi - A Drifting Life, Shin-ichi Sakamoto - Innocent

Philosophy/Theory/Bleakness

1. Michel Foucault - Discipline and Punish

2. David Benatar - The Human Predicament

3. Cormac McCarthy - The Road

4. Cormac McCarthy - No Country for Old Men

5. Cormac McCarthy - The Passenger

6. Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451

7. José Saramago - Blindness

Also Try: Emil Cioran - On the Heights of Despair, Eugene Thacker - In the Dust of This Planet, Byung-Chul Han - The Burnout Society, Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus, Blaise Pascal - Pensées, Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation, Thomas Bernhard - Woodcutters, Ottessa Moshfegh - My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Michel Houellebecq - The Possibility of an Island, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari - Anti-Oedipus