She also has a prior conviction for intentionally spreading COVID.
Get a job and stop whining.
I’ve heard that about The Dispossessed. I tried to listen to it on audiobook and the narration was terrible, so I just couldn’t get far into it. I need to pick up a physical or digital copy.
Oh, and Malazan is great. That one took me two tries to really get into as well, mostly because I initially had trouble keeping track of so many characters.
Enjoying a classic book is not pretentious. Conversely, gatekeeping what people think is a must-read is pretty pretentious.
Reading books which make you think is also not pretentious, and I get the idea that you sure think it is. There’s nothing wrong with light reading for fun, but some people enjoy more variety than that.
The sequels are worth it.
No. The Count of Monte Cristo is a much better and deeper novel, but The Three Musketeers is much lighter and more fun. They’re both good reads for different reasons.
I’ve been thinking the same myself. I remember it having such an impact on me as a kid.
I don’t mean to be replying to every post on this thread–I guess I love a lot of books–, but I’m going to have to recommend these in particular for people who don’t usually read.
I had this friend in college who had never read a book of his own volition. He wasn’t the sort of person who was proud of the fact, he just thought books were boring and had trouble getting through them. This horrified me, as somebody who had a collection of some 500 books or so at that point (almost all of them read). Anyway, he read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and then Catch-22, and he was hooked. He’s been a reader ever since.
I agree with more than one of these, but I would call out The Metamorphosis as one that everybody should read. You can appreciate it at any age (well, within reason–maybe not for the 8-year-olds), it’s dramatic and captivating, and it’s short.
I always try to recommend books of short stories to my friends who like to read but don’t have much time for it.
I really loved The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. I was surprised at how well they held up over time.
The dystopic books that warn us of what we could be.
1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, Animal Farm, The Giver (and yes, you should still read The Giver even if you’re an adult if you’ve never read it before).
But the first book that flashed through my mind when I read the question was Slaughterhouse Five.
Wholeheartedly agree with The Stranger, but I think most people would not quite get it/appreciate its theme.
Funny. I absolutely hated Stranger in a Strange Land. It felt like a 14-year-old boy’s fantasy/im14andiamsmart. Pretentious and masturbatory.
Maybe I would have loved it if I read it when I was 14 instead of when I was something like 22.
It’s actually my go-to example for a book that I dislike. I think it’s the only book I’ve really actually hated. I would have just thought it was tripe if it hadn’t taken such a wonderful title away. Now there will never be a good book with that fantastic title.
A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul G. Tremblay comes to mind.
I don’t know that the payoff is necessarily better than the mystery, but the show Dark is a great mystery story as well.
I appreciate that. I’ve been fortunate enough that I was able to hire attorneys to help me with insurance purposes. And yes, I have needed not one but two attorneys to deal with it. The system is broken and designed for people to fail. You don’t want to end up disabled in the US.
As a former tech person turned disabled person, I second this. I used to be working towards a masters in computer science. Now I can’t type or use a mouse more than occasionally in short bursts.
Don’t fuck up your hands. Life is hard with limited use of your hands.
The person said they’d pray for you because they thought you were a dumpster diver i.e. that you were gonna eat out of the trash so that’s what happened there.
Possible, but it is a huge stretch to automatically assume that was what they were thinking.
I don’t think the broader populace has any link between the two of them in their minds.