John Irving - The Cider House Rules
Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights
Octavia Butler - Wild Seed
Ursula K. LeGuin - Always Coming Home or The Dispossessed
Michael Crichton - Eaters of the Dead/The 13th Warrior
Jack Kerouac - On the Road
Karen Joy Fowler - We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Elizabeth Wein - Code Name: Verity
I include these books because of my experience in reading them - it felt more like something was happening to me than I was just reading a story.
Yes, but not all Pratchett. Skip The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic - come back to them once youâre familiar with the Discworld.
By this point youâre no longer a virgin Pratchett reader.
Kiss me Hardy!
Also, the Book Thief by Markus Zusak.
Robert Asprin - M.Y.T.H. and Phuleâs Company
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, both alone and together - The Integral Trees, Imperial Stars, Janissaries, the Mote in Godâs Eye
Stephen Kingâs short stories and epics - especially once some of the later ones relate back to earlier ones or cross-relate to each other. You donât really read those books, they just sort of envelop you and you live in their world for awhile.
Night Shift was the case for me.
A. Conan Doyle: the Sherlock Holmes stories. So much better than the pop culture caricatures (exceptions made for Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett).
Philip K. Dick: hard to pick one, or even some, because it will depend on the reader. For me itâs A Scanner Darkly, Mary and the Giant, and Radio Free Albemuth.
James Tiptree Jr.: everything, but especially The Man Who Walked Home and The Women Men Donât See.
Ursula K. LeGuin: any 12yo reading The Tombs of Atuan, and the rest of the trilogy. And then everything else.
Anne McCaffery: The Dragonsong trilogy, and then The Ship Who Sang.
JK Rowling: her mystery novels. I love the Potter series too, but the mysteries are more free to explore current society, and her descriptions are brilliant.
John Le Carré: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The prologue alone blew me away.
Albert Camus: any novel, especially if you can read it in French. His translators tend to be more verbose than he is and ruin the tone.
Alice Walker: The Color Purple.
Hey, I liked Faust Eric!
For any Holmes fansâŠ
R. Austin Freeman. Theyâre public domain, now,too, so feel free to grab them from your favourite source for free e-books. Even Chandler called him brilliant.
ETA: Columbo fans, too. Especially if you like the âreverse mysteryâ style.
The Casual Vacancy pleasantly surprised me. I donât know what I was expecting, except a real turkey of a book maybe, but this one was pretty good. It was such a departure from Harry Potter that I thought it would be a hollow imitation of a mystery novel, but Rowling creates memorable characters, and hateable characters, and thatâs something that transcends genre.
I loved The Casual Vacancy! Then again, I love Middlemarch, and both books have a similar sense of time and similarly large cast of characters. I did not expect the focus to gradually close in on Samantha like that â and I did not expect to wind up liking her when all was said and done.
Every. Single. One. of my friends was aghast that Iâd not only read any Stephen King but particularly hadnât read The Dark Tower books. After years of putting it off Iâm now on book 3, and can see why these characters mean so much to people.
Iâm in a similar situation. I was introduced to King by school mates thrusting his books into my hands, insisting I read the pages they had the book open to. It was always a revolting horror scene. Even though I like scary stories, I am a notorious wimp, so I got very turned off reading a whole book.
I only started reading his fiction after I read On Writing. I tend to stick to the later, more science fiction and fantasy books.
Why ever would you do it that way? Thatâll just make TCoM and TLF feel like a lower-quality slog (compared to the later books), fit only for the completist. Those books deserve better.
Read 'em in order. Those first two are perfectly enjoyable, but you get to feel your love for the Discworld grow and swell as Pratchettâs talents and skill increase through the series. If you canât make it through the first two without wanting more, youâre probably not going to have the tastes for digging into all 40 books.
(Co-)incidentally, the murder mystery I am currently reading, The Long Divorce, references R. Austin Freemanâs detective Dr. Thorndyke. The Long Divorceâs author, Edmund Crispin, playfully breaks the fourth wall on occasion. The novels are written in a farcical, literary and humorous style. The amateur detective throughout the mystery novels, Oxford Languages and Literature don Gervase Fen adopts the pseudonym âMr Datcheryâ from Dickensâ The Mystery of Edwin Drood for The Long Divorce.
Stephen King is an excellent, captivating writer and many of his earlier works I enjoyed without aftermath nightmares. However, I stopped reading King for awhile the day after I finished Pet Sematary, which was when my (wretched) stepfather died, and I dreamed my mom drove his Lincoln Continental into the carport, trilling âGuess who I brought back from the morgue!â
But they are lower quality compared to what came after*. TCoM and TLF are Discworld with training wheels on. He was noodling with fantasy parody rather than the world-building that occurs in Equal Rites onwards. TCoM and TLF work best if youâre familiar with the stories heâs parodying (Iâm not sure how many new readers are going to have read Anne McCaffery, for example) but theyâre not necessarily a good indicator of what comes later.
If you read them in order the switch from parody to a more cohesive world is a little jarring so I recommend strarting with Equal Rites and going back to them later.
Although Iâve just realised Sourcery comes between TLF and Eric so maybe jump back to TCoM and TLF as an intro to Sourcery rather than Eric and Interesting Times?
*They are, however, all brilliant (at least up until Moist von Lipwig)
Well, I disagree. Theyâre all parody to some degree (old Universal horror movies for the Uberwald-set books, Macbeth for Wyrd Sisters, noir gumshoe mysteries for some of the Night Watch stories, sword-n-sandal epics for the Silver Horde, etc.) and the world just became more cohesive as Pratchett filled in the details, book by book. It never felt jarring to me. I enjoyed learning about the Discworld in the same order it more or less was created. Some books are better than others, but I donât think any are skippable. The most self-contained is probably Small Gods, which many people consider the best of the lot.
I think it comes down to personal preference. I started with Equal Rites and then going back to TCoM and TLF and it didnât feel smooth. Iâd still recommend starting with ER, though.
Thatâs the fascinating thing to me. Youâve got this guy that Raymond Frickinâ Chandler basically calls brilliant, writing a character that gets namechecked in more than a few other works, and yet most people today have never even heard of the man.
And unlike Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe, Thorndyke was a genius who had no trouble acknowledging other peopleâs genius: where Watson is Holmesâ âdull friendâ Thorndyke stands in awe of Poulton.
So why arenât these books on the same bookshelves as Christie, Chandler and Conan Doyle? Whereâs the Thorndyke TV series?
Indeed! Maybe a resurgence is near. Itâs definitely due. BBC Radio Four Extra did air some radio plays adapted from Freemanâs Dr. Thorndyke mysteries. AND, although not a TV series, I see in a Full Record of âThe Rivals of Sherlock Holmesâ DVD Box set a made-for-television adaptation of A Message From the Deep Sea (1971) (YouTube link) starring John Neville, and The Moabite Cipher (1973) (YouTube link) with Barrie Ingham and recently departed Peter Sallis.
(R. Austin Freeman fans are lucky to have those Thames TV adaptation. At best, thereâs an audiobook version of an Edmund Crispin novel, and cinematically, only the intro theme to âCarry On, Nurseâ, as composer R. Bruce Montgomery actually wrote those Gervase Fen mysteries)
Martin Edwards, current President of The Detection Club, included a R. Austin Freeman story in the Serpents In Eden: Countryside Crimes anthology.
I just today learned, Googling about The Long Divorce, of The Poisoned Chocolates Case, written by The Detection Clubâs founder Anthony Berkeley, and reissued within the last year (now on my growing to-read list). G.K. Chesterton, whose Father Brown sleuth is legendary, was The Detection Clubâs first President. Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie were among the Clubâs most prominent members. American âlocked room mysteryâ writer John Dickson Carr was also a member. Dickson Carr is unjustly forgotten.
Miraculous Mysteries: Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (British Library Crime Classics), another anthology edited by Martin Edwards, including a story from R. Austin Freeman, was published just a little over six weeks ago. I must go to my local Mystery Bookshop (or library! whee!) to have a look-see.