What are your "must-read" books?

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Discworld by Terry Pratchett
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein
Lost Moon by Jim Lovell and Jeffery Kluger
Hackers by Steven Levy
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffery
Noble House by James Clavell
Any Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald
Thrice Upon a Time by James P. Hogan
Jhereg by Steven Brust
Rendevous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
Beat to Quarters by C.S. Forester
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Edit: I'd forgotten that I had updated this list recently with a new entry:

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman

I love Exhalation by Ted Chiang and I'd recommend it to everyone! It's a collection of short speculative fiction. Deeply imaginative, immersive, and thoughtful.

Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. It's an unconventional work, presented as a series of pensive dialogues between explorer Marco Polo and the emperor Kublai Khan, in which Polo describes dozens of the fantastical cities he has discovered. Each one represents some poetic or philosophical concept, such as a city built on a precarious net over a deep gorge, or where the buildings are arranged in order to trap a beautiful fugitive seen in a shared dream, or where the personal connections between people are represented by colored strings that remain long after the city is abandoned and turns to dust. They're all fascinating and memorable, but what really makes it worthwhile is the prose -- despite (or perhaps because of) it being a translation from the original Italian, every page is rich with some of the most elegant and beautiful sentences I've ever read in fiction. Combined with the plotless, bite-sized pacing and the dreamlike feel it's the perfect book to dip into over and over again, preferably right before going to bed.

An excerpt from the introduction to give you a taste:

Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies' protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing.

The left hand of darkness and the dispossessed by Ursula K le Guin. These books are the first Sci fi books in a loooong time to make me have to take some time after reading them. They have fantastic ideas in them that are relevant to today's world.

Kitchen confidential by Anthony bourdain. I'm a massive fan of bourdain. This book is just so easy to read and it's funny. I used to work in hospitality so I can relate to a lot of whats going on in the book but it's still just an engrossing read.

I would recommend:
Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Cat's Eye and The Handmaidens Tale by Margaret Atwood
Once, On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino
One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nobokov
Tortilla Flat, Of Mice And Men, and East of Eden by John Steinbeck
The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin
Neuromancer by William Gibson

I would also recommend the collected short stories of Roald Dahl

The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. It's a lovely book about thinking critically and nurturing curiosity.

I'd fully recommend the Wayfarers quadrilogy (I've linked to the first book in the series) to anyone with a pulse and an interest in stories about people.

They're Sci-Fi but it's a set of stories about believeable characters, there's no real stakes or typical good guys/ bad guys plot, but small scale stories about small casts of tight-knit people. I got one of my friends reading the books and he threatened to hurt me after getting about half way into the first book if anything happened to any of the crew.

I think they're really incredible.

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari changed by view of human society. Might have accelerated by disillusionment with academia. Very impactful for me.
• The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck has stuck with me for about 20 years.
• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie reignited my love of reading
• Embassy Town by China Mieville an excellent "Weird Fiction." China Mieville often writes about change, this sci-fi looks at a alien society changing as their language evolves.

Since no one has suggested books of poems so far, I will drop a few here:

• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• Tulsa Kid by Ron Padgett
• Spring and All by William Carlos Williams
• Howl by Alan Ginsberg

1984 - Really should be required reading with the state of technology these days.

Most of the others I'd recommend have been mentioned elsewhere in this topic. Depending on if they get finished and stick the landing, i might eventually add-

King Killer Chronicles
Game Of Thrones (honestly might be there anyways)
Locked Tomb Series

I tend to read mostly non-fiction.

A book I read this year was: 4000 weeks, which really helped me be a little less stressed about how frantically short our time is here.

I very much enjoyed Ishmael by Daniel Quinn for a totally fictional book. (Rare for me)
Our relationship with the planet is busted and we are “takers” using up the world. This book is a good way to have that conversation with yourself.

The little book of humanism is a good read. I’ve never wanted /needed religion but this book shows it doesnt matter if you have it, need, it don’t want it, you can just choose to do things and doing good things for the sake of it, is not a bad way to frame living on this rock.

I also enjoy the “shortest history on x” series and read the shortest history of Germany this year, which covered a bunch of stuff from huns and goths to prussians to modern Germany. I thought it was a good way to get a high level overview.

I’ve been eyeing Asimov stories, and Dune recently, there’s a new edition with nice artwork since the release of the movie. I dunno if the lore is a bit too much like reading the warhammer 40k Wikipedia though….

That is a tricky question because people like different genres of books. There is also a thread in ~books about favorite nonfiction.

Here are some of my all time favorites.

Fantasy Watership Down, Lions of Al Rassan, Black Water sister by Zen Cho, several by Pratchett including Going Postal, Small Gods, the Truth, Witches Abroad. Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser series by Lieber, the Hobbit

Science fiction the Warriors Apprentice by Bujold , Roadside Picnic by Strugatsky, Remnant Population and Vattas War series by Elizabeth Moon, the Dosadi Experiment, Callahans Cross time Saloon, Island in the Sea of Time, A Canticle for Leibowitz

Love story the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society,

Uplifting hopeful fiction All Creatures Great and Small, Up the Down Staircase, the Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven by Kingsolver, the Wind in the Willows,

Coming of age stories, A Story Like the Wind and a Far Off Place by Van Der Post, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, My Name is Asher Lev, Anne of Green Gables, Deed of Paksenarrion (fantasy) The Wee Free Men (fantasy) The Adventures of Dunk and Egg (, fantasy) the Sword in the Stone (fantasy)

Realistic fiction with dark themes, the Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne, Bel Canto by Patchett, the Things They Carried,

Murder mystery Strong Poison and Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers, the Blessing Way and sequels by Tony Hillerman,

Historicalfiction the Physician by Noah Gordon, the King Must Die and Bull From the Sea by Renault, I Claudius, Shogun by Clavell

Classic authors Kipling , Dumas, Steinbeck, Wila Cather, Jack London

Short stories Roald Dahl, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain

My list is going to include a mix of non-fiction and fiction, with the fiction part first and the non-fiction last.

• Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

• The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

Got to include the two people that had made the modern fantasy a thing, so I have to include Lewis and Tolkien on this list.

• Dune by Frank Herbert

I had to give credit to Herbert that he did made a masterpiece (just ignore the fact that it took me four different times to read through it) of a novel that still has sway to this day in sci-fi.

• The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years by Chinghiz Aitmatov

• Soul by Andrey Platonov

• Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Oh look four Soviet books that are back to back, I had included these because they are interesting because the Aitmatov novel is more in line with what the Soviet boards were looking for in the late Soviet era, while the Strugatsky novel is not. And I had included Soul by Platonov is because I had enjoyed reading it, and it is a official book despite the alleged history behind it. And Bulgakov's novel is the most recent read on this list, and it was a lot of fun reading it, despite it being the weirdest reads I had done (and @mrzool does a better job of telling what the book is about in this thread).

• Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

Really the only "Modern" book on this list. The reason for the inclusion is because it is a fun read.

Time for the non-Fictions.

• With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge

This one is interesting because the way that Sledge describes the after math of the battles, particularly one of them on Peleiu, just takes you to the battle because of vivid the descriptions are. Although some of the language that he uses can be considered outdated by modern means, it is still a great read. Also Netflix has the Pacific, which is loosely based on this book.

• The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials by Telford Taylor

This one is also interesting because Taylor was a key participate of the Nuremberg Trials as a prosecutor. But what makes it interesting is that he writes in a way that it acts like a memoir for himself and a history book on what happened during the trial. What I mean by this is that he included some stuff that he would not have access to nor would have known during this time period, but he does this to add on to his own experience of conducting the trials. And through the book he does talk about the difficulties of conducting the trials and how his Soviet counterparts attitudes changed after the Iron Curtain fell across Eastern Europe, which was interesting to read about.

My all-time favorite novel: Unwind by Neal Shusterman. It's about a dark future where parents can sign away their kids to be "unwound" between ages 13-18. Unwinding is a process where every part of your body is taken apart to be reused for transplants and such.

I read it in high school, and it's one of the most thought-provoking books I've ever read. I realized one day I was thinking of it months later. I only realized within the last few years it's technically a dystopian novel, because the dystopian aspects aren't in your face at every corner. The government doesn't micro-manage people's existences or outlaw writing, society doesn't seem fantastically idyllic with some dark secret underbelly. It genuinely feels like an average government outside this one category of laws. It is, to date, the most realistic depiction of a dystopian society I've seen.

It goes into why people make and justify the choice to have kids unwound, too. From just the three protagonists: the main protagonist was just a troublemaker. The female lead was a foster kid in a crowded home. Then the third protagonist was from a religious family and raised with the intention to be unwound as a tithe. That last one is particularly mind-blowing to me.

There's so much more, but I won't go into further detail. It's actually the first in a series, but I have yet to read the rest. At this point I'm almost afraid to because the original novel just left such an impact on me. I fear the rest won't stand up to the shadow I've created in my mind, and the first book stands well enough on its own.

Some Books I Like:

1. Euthyphro - Plato
2. The Enchiridion - Epictetus
3. Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 - Marx
4. Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith
5. Existentialism is a Humanism - Jean-Paul Sartre
6. Over-Soul - Ralph Waldo Emerson
7. Phenomenology of Spirit - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
8. Will to Power - Friedrich Nietzsche
9. The Gray Lady Winked - Ashley Rindsberg
10. The Journalist and The Murderer - Janet Malcolm
11. Think on These Things - Jiddu Krishnamurti
12. Paper Belt on Fire - Michael Gibson
13. Sovereign Individual - James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg
14. Incerto (Series) - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
15. Harry Potter (Series) - J.K. Rowling
16. Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant
17. The Logic of Scientific Discovery - Karl Popper
18. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
19. Either/Or - Søren Kierkegaard
20. Being and Time - Martin Heidegger
21. Experience and Nature - John Dewey
22. The Ascent of Money - Niall Ferguson
23. The Age of Reason - Thomas Paine
24. The Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch
25. Broken Money - Lyn Alden
26. American Default - Sebastian Edwards
27. Hidden Repression - Alex Gladstein
28. Straight to Hell - John LeFevre
29. The Network State - Balaji Srinivasan
30. Makers and Takers - Rana Foroohar
31. Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order - Ray Dalio
32. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant - Eric Jorgenson
33. Energy and Civilization: A History - Vaclav Smil
34. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human - Richard Wrangham
35. Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical - Gregory Chatin
36. The Computer and the Brain - John von Neumann
37. Candide - Voltaire
38. Psycho-Cybernetics - Maxwell Maltz
39. Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics - Richard P. Feynman
40. The Innovation Stack - Jim McKelvey
41. Whole Earth Discipline - Stewart Brand
42. What Is Mathematics? An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods - Richard Courant

Manifesto of the Communist Party - Marx and Engels

The State and Revolution - Lenin

Wage Labour and Capital - Karl Marx

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State - Friedrich Engels

Reform or Revolution - Rosa Luxemburg

The City and the City - China Mieville

The Colour out of Space - HP Lovecraft

Maus - Art Spiegelman

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

Pretty much all of the novels I would recommend have already been mentioned, some a couple of times so I'll only mention a couple.

Moonraker by Ian Fleming - My favourite of Fleming's Bond novels. It's a fantastic cold war novel that really captures the classic Bond formula, stopping a disfigured megalomaniacal industrialist from destroying the world. If you haven't read literary Bond before he's less smooth talking super spy and more handsome, brutal government assassin with a penchant for good food and beautiful women. Bearing in mind the book was also written in the mid-50's Bond can also be a bit of a bigoted brute to modern sensibilities. However, all that said the book is relatively short, Fleming's sense of place is second to none thanks to his background as a travel journalist, and it's a great read full of exciting action featuring the world's greatest secret agent, 007!

The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie - I've only read the first book of this trilogy (will be picking up the second shortly) and I loved it. The setting is very cool and well fleshed out without feeling like an info dump at any point. The characters are awesome and are all various shades of grey, especially Inquisitor Glokta who is just so fun, I was always happy when I got to a chapter involving him. The story itself is complex and layered with multiple stories both personal and on an grander scale intertwining before reaching a climax leading into the next book.

The Maid should've been told Rashomon-style with different viewpoints. The author didn't use the main character's "superpower" at all. And the ending was just "meh".

Fiction books I would't've normally read, but they were in my book club and I was surprised to enjoy them:

The House in the Cerulean Sea this book will make you feel nice and warm inside, don't read the others by the same author, because he Has A Type and isn't afraid to use it :) This is the best one of his.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a fun book about game development over three decades. The author does make a few technical gaffes and there's a bit where the MC gets Really Jacked And Muscular - and then it's never mentioned again. Still a fun book to experience despite its length.

Some of my non-fiction favourites:

Peopleware - a book from 1987 still hits 100% for anyone working in any kind of team. Especially good for software development teams.

Invisible Women - don't be intimidated by the page count, pretty much 50% of the book is sources. But DO prepare to get really angry at the world and lazy scientists and developers who just ignore 50% of the population because it's too hard to include them.

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code has saved my ass a few times when I had to dive into codebases older than my career and fix them

Designing Data-Intensive Applications same as above, but for wrangling huge amounts of data

"Perfume: The Story of a Murderer", "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", "1984", "Lord of the Rings", and "Dune". All of those books are unique, thought-provoking, and excellently written. I recommend reading "Perfume" in German if you can. Patrick Süskind has an incredible way of describing smells.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.

Set in a monastery generations after a nuclear war. It follows the monks who are sort of keepers of knowledge books.

Surprised no one has mentioned it but The Will to Change by bell hooks, or honestly anything by hooks, All About Love, Where We Stand: Class Matters, Belonging they're all so good.
I'm Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya is also really good.
Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti is a classic
I also really liked Blood in My Eye by George Jackson
Feminism for the 99% by Arruzza Cinzia as well!
Sorry someone said it was very male heavy and these aren't exactly good stories (insofar that they aren't fiction), but personally I could not put any of these down I just kept reading and reading. Hope you enjoy and I have taken down so many of these recs! Thanks everyone :D

The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield

• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach