Listed here in no particular order. Will continue to expand as I find new, great books. Adding notecards about what I enjoy in them. Maybe some emojis regarding fun plot points.
Books:
Dune - Frank Herbert
🐛🔮🗡️
Herbert takes his readers eight thousand years into a grim future of galactic tyranny, brutal cartels, and vicious family rivalries. Here, we learn that time can not and will not fulfill our hopes and wishes: rather, it is a dark reflection of humanity's dispassion towards humankind. And its love of various recreational and medical pharmaceuticals.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
☕️📓🚀
A classic rivaling Dune for the size of its international audience, and far surpassing it in hilarity as the uniquely English Earth-man Arthur Dent is shot, slurped, and yanked hither and yon across time and space, much to his whining chagrin. While Dent just wants a nice hot cuppa Earl Grey, the Earth and all its tea trees have been destroyed to make way for a new hyperspace highway. Of course, as the last of your species, you could always get rich selling your skin samples...
The Stand - Stephen King
🦠🧛🧬
OK Jack, what the hell. Not vouching for the Dark Tower? Well, I am, in a sense. Many King works including It, Salem's Lot, and The Eyes of the Dragon have some linkage into the dimly lit, parallel worlds of Roland Deschain and Randall Flagg. I always (weirdly) found Flagg to be a somewhat sympathetic villain, and this one builds him up into a literal nuclear power.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Phillip K. Dick
🚔🦾🐑
Many of Dick's protagonists are everyday workmen--and Deckard's job is 'retiring skin-jobs,' that is, dismantling manufactured androids imbued with a sense of purpose. Nay, a soul? Can you murder a toaster? Why would you take the pains to care for a robot ewe? Lots to reflect on here.
Annihilation - Jeff Vandermeer
🧱🐊🏝️
Lovecraft enjoyed smashing our brains in with a golden brick of insanity topped with a dusting of Eurocentrism. Vandermeer, blissfully, uses a more diffuse worldview and forces us to question: when you and I are looking at the same thing, do we see a tunnel or a tower? And what's that thing making the horrid squishy snuffling sounds in the night?
The Decameraon - Giovanni Botocelli
👰🏻♀️🍑🔥
During the height of the European plagues of the Renaissance, ten pilgrims recount subversive, strange, and nightmarish tales on their long sojourn. This work of verse would go on to inspire Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as well as the more modern Hyperion. And it's very, very funny.
The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
💪🏙️🐷
As a Chicagoan, this is a must-read. You'll know about the ashen days of stockyard slaughter before we had those nice things like 8-hour workdays and paid time off. Get ready to see some innocents getting brutalized. By and large, the bad guys get away with it all.
Maus - Art Spiegelman
🐭💀🙀
Thought we were already on the heavies? Get ready. An Auschwitz survivor and his nearly-estranged son engage in a dialogue about his interwar life in Poland and the total liquidation of his community, belongings, and family. Retold as a graphic novel that pulls no punches with its depictions of political, physical, and sexual violence, you will likely want to look away. Read both books.
1984 - George Orwell
⬇️🟰⬆️
More grim darkness: this postwar book by the brilliant veteran describes a future of unimaginable drudgery and endless pain inflicted upon the protagonist by an utterly unaccountable and godlike surveillance state. Orwell seemed to believe that politics worked like thermodynamics: you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't even quit the game.
The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
😈📬👹
You've Got Mail in Hell: two demons exchange correspondence on how best to corrupt the souls of one mortal man (Your Patient). While a distinctly Christian classic, it's also a grand refutation of simpler blends of theology and helps us recognize that a moral universe may be more complicated than we imagine. Also see Twain's Letters from the Earth.
At the Mountains of Madness - H.P. Lovecraft
🥶🪐🦠
A classic of HPL's Cthulhu universe, an intrepid rescue party searches for survivors of a lost antarctic expedition. Just don't go too deep into that mysterious, cuboid shaft whose toilsome manufacture clearly predated the Antedeluvian and Jurassic Era. And just ignore those unearthly shrieks in this land so far from all you knew.
The Trial - Franz Kafka
🙇♂️🚪🧑⚖️
You should know what this is about already: a man wakes to hear that he has been summoned into a horrifying and quixotic system of opaque origin and intention. Spoiler: he does not escape.
Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke
⏱️🐋👿
Not the apocalypse you expected. I'll leave it at that.
My Man Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse
🦎🍿😥
In my opinion, the funniest work on this list. Young English fop Bertie Wooster wants nothing to do with marriage, a career, or anything that doesn't involve fast cars and booze. His soft-spoken & inimitably brilliant butler, Jeeves, helps his bachelor life endure through schemes of byzantine complexity and hilarious anxiety as they skirt the wishes of his thin-lipped, demanding aunts. Wodehouse wrote this in a POW camp, so the flights of fancy are truly delectable.
Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
🙈 💾 🏢
Israeli Archaeologist Harari has a pretty steady understanding of our backgrounds (literally all of them) and a general idea where we might find ourselves in the next 2-10 thousand years.
White Noise - Dom DeLillo
🍄 🔫 🚂
A book about expertise for expertise's sake in a world where very little has meaning. A local professor on the pioneering field of Hitler Studies at a tiny upstate college sees his life falling apart, just as a chemical explosion unleashes an unknown compound across his small northeastern town. Even worse, his campus is hosting an event for a broad swath of other Hitler experts from Centeral Europe. And our hero just doesn't seem to have much of a knack for German.
A Canticle for Leobowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.
⌛️⛪⏳
More apocalypse, but this one has a redemptive face. The knowledge of our world is squirreled away in a Salt Lake monestary in the immediate aftermath of the bomb. Many centuries later, new struggles emerge. And so on.
Michael Strogoff - Jules Verne
🔥🔪🐻
This one is old-school, full-fat, no-diet-soda adventure. A knight makes his way across the barren, hostile, and unimaginably beautiful back-country of Imperial Russia in a desperate bid to warn the Tsar of a secret invasion. At one point I think he even kills a bear with his 'bare' hands.
The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson
🛼 📚 💎
A very fun deconstruction of the cyberpunk genre. Less heists, more Sense & Sensibility.
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
🧙🏻♂️🚘🧟♀️
An american interpretation of Odin Allfather travels the backroads of America searching for a way towards the future. Ragnarok is coming.
The Mote in God's Eye - Jerry Pournelle
Aliens, but not the ones you expected. And when things go sideways, we may find ourselves regretting that we ever sought out extraterrestrial life at all.
Letters from the Earth - Mark Twain
Satan, taking a brief 500,000-year exile from Heaven as a demerit for questioning God's architectural sensibilities, sends letters back to Michael and Raphael in secret wondering why God's new featherless bipeds would worship him in the manner they do.
Neuromancer - William Gibson
If you don't yet, know that it is THE seminal work in the cyberpunk canon. Neon skylines of endless night. Mysterious employers of uncertain origin. Strange dames with knives for hands. And an uncertain chance at redemption.
Frankenstein - Mary Shelly
Somehow, Mary Shelly wrote this one in less than a week. Without breaking into silliness about how it's the name of the doctor rather than the monster, this provides a great insight into the age of science that dawned in the 19th century, and a look backwards into whether the possible should be made into the real.
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
Every detective story from Chinatown to Watchmen to Neuromancer has ripped off of this one. A smoky office with a young, loyal secretary. An old friend killed in a wet alley. Mysterious gals with opaque intentions. Dirty cops with reputations to protect. An old, laughing man and his murderous yeg. Plus a treasure that could change anybody's life.
Hyperion - Dan Simmons
More modern, and more in-depth. I put this one near the bottom of the list because it's really a reader's/writer's sci-fi. Let's say that this one will drag you down paths you never expected to see, much less explore. Definitely pulls some Terminator fluff involving time travel & sentient robots, but there's always the lurking danger of a mob of human barbarians just beyond the reaches of the known universe.
A Princess of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs
Yet another piece of remarkably original scifi, mostly akin to a 'Tarzan on Mars.' Since Edgar also wrote Tarzan, you can dig why both movies came out from Disney around the same time. This one, however, is a lot harder to put into a kid's film if only due to Burrough's attitudes on race, capitalism, and the Civil War.
Superintelligence - Nick Bostrom
It's a spooky one. I don't personally listen to the folks who worry about Roko's Basilisk or Skynet, but Bostrom pulls the right strings to convince you that this could easily occur--or already has.
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
I'm sure you've seen the movie. But if you want to get deep down into the series, you should probably also check out his responsa to George Orwell, called 1985.
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
I really, really love books on power dynamics. This one is kind of like an American version of Jane Austen, with a much bleaker ending.
The Nose - Nikolai Gogol
In this bizarre short story, a man's own nose outstrips him in importance. Excellent Russian hyper-realism shows the reader a world strangely magical and mundane at the same time. But do try to imagine conversing with your own body part while it wears a nicer hat than you have.
Bullfinch's Mythology - Thomas Bullfinch
Do you like Gods and monsters? Do you prefer your poetry to be more straightforward than Ovid's Metamorphoses? Check this one out. Designed initially as a sort of Cliff's notes for the Classics, its straightforward design promotes easy accessibility. Kids love it too.
Del rigor en la ciencia- Jorge Luis Borges
Esta historia es mas corto que una pagina. En caso que de no leas Español, reproduciré un traduccion en Ingles aqui:
"... In that Empire, the Cartographic Art reached such Perfection that a Map of one Province filled a City, and a map of the Imperial Demesne, a Province. In time, these Colossal Maps proved wanting, and the College of Cartographists assembled a Map of the Imperium that was the Size of the Imperium in toto, coinciding with it at all points. Less Addicted to the Study of Cartography, the Next Generation felt that such a Map was Useless, and, not lacking Impiety, gave it unto the Cruelty of the Sun and Wind. In the Deserts of the West, there yet endure ragged Fragments of the Map, haunted by beasts and mendicants; in all the rest of the land, there are no other remnants of the Study of Geography."
Nightwood - Djuna Barnes
A cult classic in every sense of the word. Lots to do with sexuality, race, otherness, and the obsession with being accepted by a people who really don't want to have that much to do with you.
Passing - Nella Larsen
Via the lens of her own heritage, Larsen explores the various avenues of society are open to us but barred to many of those like us. As often occurs when we try to pioneer the unknown, tragedy ensues.
Generation of Swine - Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter rips Nixon a new one. Great prose. New journalism. Very dry.
🐇 🐢 🐌
Poems:
Darkness - Lord Byron
Still I Rise - Maya Angelou
The Raven - Edgar Allen Poe
Ozymandias - Percy Bysshe Shelly
The Tyger - William Blake
Harlem - Langston Hughes
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night - Dylan Thomas
Kubla Khan - Samuel Coleridge
In Flanders Fields - John McCrae
Ode to a Blackbird - John Keats