Every year it feels like there are a couple dozen non-fiction releases I want to read while I find maybe one interesting fiction author every couple years. I have too many interests to keep up with all the papers and books I want to read anyway, so I’m content to mostly read non-fiction, but it’s been four years since I’ve read some good fiction and I’d like to try some new stuff. The last novel I read was My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which felt kind of dumb and empty despite being well written at the sentence level.
My favorite fiction authors are Gene Wolfe, Borges, Proust, Nabokov, Calvino, W.G. Sebald, China Miéville, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, Niel Stephenson, Liu Cixin, and Ted Chiang. Some random novels I love are Life: A User’s Manual, Blindsight, and Madame Bovary. I’ve tried lots of literary fiction in the past, but with the exception of rare geniuses like Proust or Sebald, I tend to find it unstimulating and generally prefer SF.
Any ideas?
by JamesOland