I’ve been a pretty voracious reader my whole life but have never dipped my toes into anything more literary or complex than Donna Tart or Sally Rooney, outside of the few classics I read in school. I’ve always read solely for fun (lots of fanfiction and BookTok books tbh) and don’t have the best attention span but I really want to expand on what I read and challenge myself.
I know this is a very general prompt but I don’t want to limit the suggestions based on genre, themes etc. The one thing I know I’m not huge on is too much emphasis on environmental and physical descriptions and I’m weary of too many characters because of the aforementioned attention span, although I’m open to it (loved Six of Crows, just to give you a calibre on my reading level haha). I would prefer a book with at least some level of humour, mystery, and/or romantic tension (only if done well) as those things keep me engaged the easiest.
Length isn’t a big factor for me either, although I’d probably have a better time starting with shorter books!
by jjfmish
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The Great Gatsby is pretty short and very readable
To Kill a Mockingbird
Huck Finn – humor, few important characters
Rebecca – romance, mystery, tension
Alice in Wonderland – humor, few characters, probably already familiar
Any Sherlock Holmes – quick reads, mystery
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – mystery
The Count of Monte Cristo – this one has it all, it’s massive but honestly a page turner
All of these are not very challenging and there’s lots of resources to look up if you have questions
I’d say Lolita by Nabakov. The writing is so breathtaking that it’ll pull you in even if you’ve never ventured into modern classics. I couldn’t put it down.
Flowers For Algernon is tragic and beautiful, feels pretty modern, and made me cry by the end.
Finally, the Hobbit is sweet and easy to read, and serves as the inspiration for most modern-day fantasy, so if you like Six of Crows maybe go back to some classic fantasy 🙂
To me, this would be Nobel or Pulitzer prize winning authors. There are many fine books by these giants.
Ernest Hemingway -The old man and the sea
William Golding – Lord of the flies
Naguib Mahfouz – The Cairo trilogy
Kazuo Ishiguro – the buried giant
Tony Morrison – Beloved
Seamus Heaney – The burial at Thebes (one of my top ten books ever!)
Gothic Tales – Isak Dinesen (Winter’s Tales are good too)
short stories, wild plots, beautiful writing, a good gate-way drug to other classics
If you want short books that are considered serious literature, that don’t have any physical / environmental descriptions or lots of characters: **Thomas Bernhard “Concrete”** and **”Yes”**. It’s not the most uplifting subject matter but his style is utterly addictive (read it out loud or whisper it to yourself) and once you get to know his work, you’ll see the dark humour of it all. I read him Dutch (German translates easier into Dutch, it’s a word order and grammatical construction thing…) so I have no idea what it’s like in English, but I heard it’s also great. By the way, the first pages of his novellas are always very tough (long sentences) but it gets easier after a page or two.