I'm new to this group so uuhh hey everyone. I just read a recent post right here and thought it would be a good way to ask my question in a similar way. Sorry in advance for the long text.
So to give some basic information:
I'm 22 years old and finished school two years ago. As a kid and teenager I loved reading and I was almost always carrying a book with me wherever I went. Honestly I don't remember many novels of that time except for Metro 2033 and the sequels which I still love to this day but here's the issue that I had/have. To keep it short, my school or rather all of my German, English and Latin teachers had a devastating way of teaching regarding analyzing literature and that carried on for 10 full years in which my passion for reading slowly declined to the point where it was almost nonexistent. The absolute extreme was reached when we had to analyze "Atonement" in my last year. A good book that I had probably liked if it weren't for 6 months of analyzing it 5 lessons a week. After half that time we were DONE with everything, absolutely EVERYTHING worth mentioning in "Atonement" but for some reason we kept analyzing it for 3 more months. In the end we were quite literally "analyzing" single sentences or even words for up to an hour and we had to do that for every single page. And now imagine that for 10 years straight, progressively getting worse. It destroyed my passion. And I'm not alone with that. Most of the other students didn't like books to begin with but after that they HATED them and those who liked reading oftentimes suffered my fate.
The only books that I kept reading were about history, science and engineering. No continuous novels.
But I want to change that. I want to read novels. Get my passion back to what it was before because I know it's just sleeping.
I started a list to gather ideas for novels that I want to read and either already possess or still need to buy. So far I have:
• "Hannibal Lecter" series by Thomas Harris
• a lot of Charles Dickens
• A LOT of Stephen King
• Bram Stokers "Dracula"
• a couple of other books written by Dmitry Glukhovsky ( author of "Metro" ) like "Futu.re" or "The Outpost"
• George Orwells "1984"
• "Lord of the Rings" by Tolkien
• a couple of "Mass Effect" novels
• Michael Crichtons "Jurassic Park"
My problem is that I have no idea what to add to my list. Those that I added have been on my mind for years but I just don't know how to find new stuff as I'm basically just entering the world of novels with no knowledge about good authors, good examples, etc.
To narrow down what I would like or not:
I do like science(fiction), historical stuff, horror, adventure, post-apocalyptic stuff, thriller, crime, criticism of society, ideologies, etc. and a bit of fantasy
I absolutely dislike anything heavily focused on romance, teen drama and similar stuff.
Someone listed a couple of movies that he or she likes to help find the right niche so I'm doing that too. Here are my movies and shows:
• Alien, Aliens
• Saving Private Ryan
• Dunkirk
• Schindlers List
• Interstellar
• Gladiator
• The Changeling (1980)
• Hannibal Lecter movie series
• Das Boot
• Everything Quite on the Western Front
• Star Wars
• Stargate
• The Walking Dead
• The Last Kingdom
• The Ring
• Annabelle
• Conjuring
• The Shining
• Jurassic Park
• Indiana Jones
• Blade Runner
• The Martian
• John Wick
• Hacksaw Ridge
• Breaking Bad
• IT
• Batman (1966)
• Batman (1989)
• The Dark Knight Trilogy
• The Hunger Games
• Pirates of the Caribbean
• A Quiet Place
• I Am Legend
• I, Robot
Again, sorry for the extremely long text but given that you're all passionate readers I guess this is not THAT bad.
Last note:
I'm fluent in German and English, my Latin is rusty and I'm currently learning Norwegian and Russian. I prefer reading books in their original language and therefore I'd prefer books written in English or German as those are my best languages but it's not an unbreakable rule. I would read translated novels originally written in other languages in case they get recommended. My favorite novel "Metro 2033" is originally Russian for example. I'm not bothered by "outdated"/"old" language in case you were wondering about that when considering a recommendation.
Thanks for reading and thank you even more for recommendations if you have any.
by JohnShepard2033