Coming back to reading after long hiatus

Hello!

First time asking for advice on anything online but I figured why not… I’ve been trying to get back into reading after a many year hiatus of not reading anything other than things for school and technical / business books (and even those very sparingly). I’ve read embarrassingly few significant fiction / non-fiction books since high school and I just turned 29. I’ll try to describe my reading history and what I might be interested in!

I read the most in middle school / high school and before that I read mostly miscellaneous short children’s fiction (e.g. the Magic Tree House series). My general reading history (the highlights at least) is as follows:

– Harry Potter and other fantasy books (e.g. the Eragon series, Artemies Fowl series, Ranger’s Apprentice Series, etc.)

– A bunch of books from Victorian Era’ish England i.e. Dickens and Austen

– Standard books from high school (which I actually read) – The Scarlet Letter, 1984, Walden, Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Bluest Eye etc.

– Random American books – Moby Dick, East of Eden, some books by Faulkner for a report in HS.

– Short stories for a college class – Various magical realism stories, Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe stories, etc.

– Miscellaneous “classics” – Crime and Punishment, Lolita, some other stuff.

Since then I haven’t read much – what I have read and remember are pretty disconnected.

I’m asking for a recommendation and giving some of my history mainly to convey the point that I’ve read some “famous” books (although I’m sure I didn’t get a ton out of them since other than Dickens / Austen I’ve read most books just once) but now I feel a bit lost trying to get back into things. When I was still serious about reading I was trying to get into the “post-modern” era and read Madame Bovary and I can’t remember what else but I couldn’t really understand why what I was reading was significant.

I’ll say that my single biggest influence in terms of reading was Dickens – I really liked his overly long sentences, his descriptions, and just the way he wrote. His stories are also pretty straightforward. I want to broaden my horizons and I was trying in high school but for a lot of books, especially more modern ones, it was difficult for me to “get” why the book was important, by which I mean why it should “feel” important to me as a person. For example, when I read magical realism stories I appreciated the mystical feeling that they created but was a bit lost other than that. When I read Kafka on the Shore I was completely at a loss – the book was written simply but was complicated, and it just felt random.

I’d love recommendations on books that felt important to them.

Tangentially, I’m also interested in books that open eyes into other cultures (I was born and raised in the US). For example, I really enjoyed China in Ten Words.

by akunp