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Tell me some good shit to read...please?
So here's the thing gang, I'm fat. I'm a big fatty fatterson. As part of my effort to not be so fucking fat, I've decided to spend more of my extraneous money on things I like rather than on junk food. Chief among them is a gym membership.
So I want you guys to recommend me things I can read; be they books, graphic novels, manga, short story collections, any old thing. I both want to expand my mind, occupy my time and to waste money. With books, I tend to lean more towards fantasy, but I will honestly read anything.
And I suppose we can make this a general recommendations thread.
Comments
Dunno if you're reading Dresden Files yet, but it's quite good.
Aside from that, Name of the Wind and anything by Sanderson jump to mind.
For manga...20th Century Boys is excellent.
I'll get the obvious out of the way and suggest you check out A Song of Ice and Fire. Grab the first book or check it out from a library and see what you think; the series as it is now will keep you going for a while.
Anything by Neil Gaiman. Or to be more specific, American Gods.
Anything by Sherman Alexie is good. He writes mostly about modern American Indians.
^^^Thirded.
Naked Lunch.
Seconding Dresden Files. There are fourteen novels plus a short story collection as of now (and it's still ongoing!), so that should keep you distracted for a while if you enjoy them. Took me two and a half years to read them all, though I read plenty of other stuff in that time as well. The Codex Alera series (six books, now finished) by the same author is also excellent, though it does unfortunately peak halfway through unlike the Dresden Files which just keeps getting better.
Seconding Sanderson books as well. I haven't read all his stuff (yet) but what I have (namely Elantris, the Mistborn trilogy, and, uh, about five chapters of Warbreaker) is fantastic.
...Not as hot on American Gods though. It's okay. I liked Neverwhere a hell of a lot more as far as Gaiman goes.
On the manga side, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is great. I don't really read much manga though.
For all I know you've already read everything in this post, though. Might help to give an idea of what authors/books you've already read and how you felt about them.
> American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Please stop Let's Playing I Wanna Be The Guy.
...sorry, someone had to do that.
Okay, comics. Let's see.
If you like big, kung-fu movie comics, try Immortal Iron Fist and/or Infinite Kung-Fu, a Marvel and an indie publication respectively.
For moody noir, cyberpunk, stories about bigotry, and humanoid animals, try Elephantmen.
Incredible Hercules is good buddy comedy superhero action.
Warren Ellis takes you on an adventure in Planetary as a mystery archaeologist.
Atomic Robo is exactly like Hellboy in terms of genre, but is fun, light-hearted, and hilarious where Hellboy is serious and dramatic.
Shazam and the Monster Society of Evil harks back to the golden age, but still is wholly relevant and readable today.
Finder is "aboriginal science fiction", a series about people and the strange world they live in (which is not too different from ours).
I don't know if you can find Otoyomegatari ("A Young Bride's Story"), but if you can, get it. It's a grand, beautifully-drawn tale of tradition, love, and family on the Silk Road.
I Kill Giants is a strange story about sadness that will take you to unexpected places and wrench your heart in doing so.
The Arrival is one of the best things I've ever read, an entirely wordless comic about a nameless immigrant from a nameless nation facing a nameless menace leaving to try and find a new life in a strange, nameless city.
If you like Metal at all Sound of The Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal is a must read.
Siddharta, Steppenwolf and Damian by Herman Hesse.
Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges.
The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato.
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.
I hear Elric is pretty swell and I actually read some Jerry Cornelius snippets that are pretty sweet, but I can't say cohesive the whole thing is.
^ Seconding ANYTHING by Scott McCloud.
ouch.
The Myth Adventures series by Robert Asprin? I only have Volume 2, but I found it entertaining.
FATAL.
Share my pain.
Okay going to nth the Dresden Files, Brian Sanderson and Sherman Alexie and Terry Pratchett with a few caveats. The Dresden Files doesn't really pick up until the 4th book and go from being passable into generally FUCK YEAH. Discworld can be hit or miss with the City Watch and Death focused books generally being the best. For Sanderson try reading Mistborn as a sampler to see if you like his style of bookisms.
Other book recs
-Pretty much anything by Haruki Murakami. Try After the Quake as a sampler.
-Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books are a quirky love letter to books and public domain hijinks in general
- Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain books
-Peter Hamilton's Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained are nice big engrossing books(okay they are really just one big book that was split in two) with a sci fi setting.
-Machine of Death is a great anthology of short stories about the simple hook of "What if we had a machine that would tell us the manner of our death, but not the exact time?"
Comic recs
-Biomega and Blame! are both great hyperviolent cyberpunk stories set in dark worlds of eerie megastructures.
- Anything by Inio Asano is great. Oyasumi Punpun and Solanin are great.
-Akira(TESTSUO!!)
-Nausicaa
-Chew
-Finder
-Saucer Country
-Blacksad
-Local
-Channel Zero
-Locke and Key
-The Parker Adaptations
-Witch Doctor
-Tales of Sand
-Infinite Kung-Fu
-Daytripper
-Essex County
-The Underwater Welder
-Y The Last Man(if you haven't read this already, get on this one first)
-Atomic Robo
Dresden Files gets thrown around a lot, so I really want you guys to explain the caveat of what makes this series so amazing in your opinions. From what I heard, it's just a supernatural detective story.
Urban fantasy with excellent worldbuilding and a damn good main character, and lots of really awesome stuff.
And "supernatural detective story" mostly describes the very early books, before the main plot becomes obvious.
The problem with descriptions "entertaining" and "well-written" is that they are kind of vague. I've seen many series that have been called that but have never elaborated further. From personal experience, whenever that happened I would check them out and realize the subject material bored the hell out of me. Could you give any possible great events from the series that would define why you think they are amazing reads?
I've also seen stuff being defended like "it's not meant to be deep" or "what's wrong with fluff"? Again, nothing wrong with that per se but IMO any series described like that personally tends to be well written and characterized but still boring.
That's just the nature of recs. If we go in on detailed stuff about how the story plays out we spoil it and get somebody else mad. All we can do is guess at what people will like and throw out names.
If you're into SF, try out Peter Watts. Blindsight, the Rifters trilogy. It's so hard you read it with a chisel, but if you endure it's definitely worth it.
I heard that the MechWarrior: Dark Age novels are better than the old, regular BattleTech novels or something like that, but I haven't read any BT novels, so...
Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay is good light reading if you like vicious serial killers and such. I'm also one of the five people who prefer the books to the show.
I recommend Berserk, though you're better off staying away from the new feature length films. Try and buy the Dark Horse translation if you can.
There's also the Valve-property-related comics Dark Horse did, though I don't think you'd want to lug the coffee-table-scale collection around (and it's honestly something you could read in a day).