Hello everyone, I'm a writer and am hoping to improve my own skills by reading more good books.
Can anyone suggest some books you think are masterfully written? (I.e, great worldbuilding, wonderful characters, exciting and engaging plot, etc.)
My favourite genres are fantasy and scifi but I'm also open to other genres such as romance, horror/thriller, contemporary, and anything else really as long as it's fictional.)
Can be standalone or a series, it doesn't matter.
Something that you read and thought was top quality.
Thanks
by asldhhef
10 Comments
**Black Pill** by Elle Reeve. It’s the best book I read all year. Highly topical, great narrative and reporting, but also the writing is phenomenal.
She’s a CNN correspondent but before her time on TV (Vice before CNN), she was writing magazine cover stories. Her old writing is also amazing. She’s a total hidden gem. Can’t wait to read her next book.
The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K Jemisin
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
In Universes by Emet North
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
Agatha Christie is probably the best writer you could ever read. Her understanding of people made even the most absurd characters feel like an actual person, her dialogue is realistic, and her plots are incredible.
Murder on the Orient Express
The Moving Finger
Death in the Nile
The ABC Murders
Read widely.
Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout. The consistency of the characters over the course of the series is amazing.
P. G. Wodehouse does comedy in a way that people have been trying to emulate for about 100 years. He basically invented the sitcom in writing. People miss it, because the absurdity is so present, but there’s a subtle sense of humor at work, too. It’s not all gags.
Georgette Heyer does fantastic world building and her characters read like real people. She built a world based on painstaking research and writers today are continuing to build on her world, some without realizing it.
Brave New World
You should check out Lois McMaster Bujold’s fantasy books *Curse of Chalion* and *Paladin of Souls*. *Curse of Chalion* in another writer’s hands would have been generic fantasy (man returns home after being betrayed during a war and sold as a galley slave) but then the world-building kicks in and takes it to another level. *Paladin of Souls* is one of my favourite books, with a side character from the first book being the main character for this one and the character work is off the scale. It’s also a prime example of remembering why you don’t need a moody teenager as your protagonist.
Seconding the rec for Broken Earth for excellence across the entire spectrum – characters, world-building and how to batter your reader’s emotions.
Pulitzer Prize winning books are typically masterfully written.
Tai-Pan by James Clavell
Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates. Molloy by Samuel Beckett.
I think Nabokov is the best prose stylist of all time