I’m talking books you read purely by chance expecting absolutely nothing and you still randomly think about it out of nowhere years later. I’m trying to broaden the range of what I’m reading and I absolutely adore those books that seem to take up space in your heart without you even realizing it. Preferably fiction, but I also just love hearing people be passionate about books they’ve read, so any will do 🙂
Extra points if it’s realistic fiction, historical fiction, or fantasy/sci fi blended with real life!
by Tryc3ratop5
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We Need To Talk About Kevin
Anxious People
Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead stayed with me for a long while after reading.
Be Not Content – William J. Craddock
Never Let Me Go
The Sparrow, The Unnamed Midwife, Left Hand of Darkness, Stoner, The Hearing Trumpet (i couldn’t just pick one, and honestly anything by Octavia Butler)
Fall On Your Knees had me so bewildered and shocked. I truly think about that book all the time–it always makes me shake my head–so well-written. Another book that stays with me, I’d read in the 1970’s would be The Good Earth. The whole cycle of poverty and wealth. And King Rat, by Clavell.
Of course there are hundreds of books I recall fondly.
HARD TO BE A GOD
(frères STROUGATSKY)
A Short Stay in Hell – Steven Peck
Maaza Mengiste: Beneath the Lion’s Gaze
To Be Taught if Fortunate by Becky Chambers
Beach Music by Pat Conroy.
It’s 650 pages of perfect sadness and honestly is one of the funniest books I have read. You get themes and talks of suicide, family drama religious drama. You get knee deep into the Holocaust, the Vietnam war. The greatest prose of all time in my opinion here are my two favorite quotes maybe of all time
“I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always. I thought that, at birth, American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.”
“As she cried, I began to under-stand. You weep at the loss of so beautiful a world and all those parts you will never be able to play again. The dark takes on different meaning. Your body has begun to prepare you for the last completion, for the peace and generosity of silence itself.”
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Someone already mentioned this, but I’ll second, is Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
My Name is Asher Lev.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.
Most recently, **The Everlasting** by Alix E Harrow.
One of the best, and most important, pieces of Fiction I’ve read in a while.
A Short Stay in Hell.
Forever War by Joe Haldeman.
I kinda knew it should be good, but I didn’t expect for it to be *that* good. The thing I’m mostly thinking back to is the ‘collapsar travel method’ (so, basically, a sentence or a few). I think it’s one of the very best ideas on how to give “wormhole jumping” that little bit of extra credibility; I’m trying to refine it for possible future use (in a story, silly!) of my own.
A short stay in hell. It was unbelievable! And pretty short.
the last few pages of North Woods
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and The Island of Missing Trees
Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert Heinlein
I am yet again recommending books by Ki Longfellow, specifically The Secret Magdalene and Flow Down Like Silver!! They are both fiction mixed with history and just a smidge of… spirituality, would be the best word to describe the vibe. Both have a historical figure (Mary Magdalene and Hypatia of Alexandria respectively) as the main character.