Oh gawd! Now you're asking!

Well now, let's see. I'm just off to bed, but do you know any Michel Faber? I find him fabuloso.

A few off the top of my head:

Anything by Russell Hoban. If you've never read him before, these are great ones to start with:
Kleinzeit
The Medusa Frequency
Pilgermann  (heavier)
Riddley Walker  (his other great masterpiece. Very different from his others; written in a post-apocalypse broken-down English that is very effective and strangely moving - but that can slow down the reading experience.)
Excellent website with lots of info Hobanesque: http://www.ocelotfactory.com/hoban/


Neal Stephenson:
Cryptonomicon
Snow Crash


Mark Z. Danielewski:
House of Leaves


Almost any of the short "fictions" of Jorge Luis Borges. The two classic collections:
Labyrinths
Ficciones


John Kennedy Toole:
A Confederacy of Dunces


Stanislaw Lem:
The Cyberiad (very funny stories)
Eden
Solaris
Fiasco
(very serious novels. Solaris is famous because of Tarkovsky's and Soderbergh's film versions. Fiasco is his greatest novel, I think. Tremendous science fiction. But not a happy story. Not at all.)

James Joyce:
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses


Samuel Beckett's great 'trilogy':
Molloy
Malone Dies
The Unnamable


Also his short prose (available complete in one volume)

Erewhon! Read it half a dozen times already, never gets old
Bizarre humour set in an utopian victorian world....

I second orph's Hoban recs.

Jeez, where to start. A few brilliant books then:

Fevre Dream by George R R Martin - steamboats and vampires, incredibly atmospheric.
The Tooth Fairy by Graham Joyce - creepy rite-of-passage book about a bunch of boys growing up.
Little, Big by John Crowley - an intricate, delicate fantasy, and self-evidently the finest book ever written.
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin - a bold, big, funny, splendid fantasy of New York, brimming with life.
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller - because come on.
Dhalgren by Samuel R Delany - if you like your SF to come in portions bigger than your head.
Diaspora by Greg Egan - SF tour de force, fizzing with ideas.

Meh. Plenty to be going on with.

Ooh, ooh ooh! I forgot this:

Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier

Some English translations retain the original French title; others call it "The Wanderer".

This one really is impossible to describe. But Tobias Hill has a fairly nice article on it here.

Perhaps more than any other, this novel has haunted my imagination since I first read it thirty years ago.

Wiðercora, what interests you in general? It may help us tailor our suggestions to you.

The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss

I just finished this yesterday and just loved it. The sequel to it just came out this past year and I can't wait to get my hands on it.

I've had my Kindle over a year now and have mostly just downloaded the free public-domain books. You can google free Kindle books and see if there's anything you're interested in, but the ones I've read and enjoyed are:


1. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
2. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
3. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself - Harriet Ann Jacobs
4. The Mysterious Stranger - Mark Twain
5. Mark Twain's Burlesque Autobiography
6. How the Bible Was Invented - M.M. Mangasarian
7. The Truth About Jesus - M.M. Mangasarian
8. The Awakening - Kate Chopin
9. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
10. Germs, Genes & Civilization - David P. Clark (I think I lucked out and got this during a promotion period. Not sure it's still free)
11. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
12. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
13. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson - Mark Twain
14. Night and Day - Virginia Woolf (I read it, but hated it)

ETA: Almost forgot -
14a. Nobody's Boy - Hector Malot
14b. Anthem - Ayn Rand

I also have already downloaded (free) but haven't yet read:

15. Ulysses - James Joyce (yes, I know, I'm a sadist)
16. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
17. The Cossacks - Tolstoy
18. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
19. The Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
20. Walden - Henry David Thoreau
21. Paradise Lost - John Milton
22. Frankenstein - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
23. Dracula - Bram Stoker
24. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
25. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
26. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
27. Children of the Frost - Jack London
28. On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin (currently working on this)

There's tons of stuff available free. Most of the fiction is, of course, old, but sometimes Kindle has promotions and you can get some current stuff. I've gotten some good, some bad that way. Just 'like' their facebook page and they'll let you know about deals and such.

I also take advantage of the 'Text-to-Speech' on some books. It's a robo-voice, so it works better on non-fiction than it does on fiction. It's hard to follow if there's a lot of dialogue. I first tried it on A Tale of Two Cities and it had me laughing hysterically. Robo-voice doesn't understand language nuances at all.

Enjoy your Kindle!

ETA: Just realized I was supposed to only be listing works of fiction. Sorry!

orpheus wrote:Ooh, ooh ooh! I forgot this:

Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier

Ah, now, I have this on my pile following a rec at RDF way back when. Probably your fault!

NamelessFaceless wrote:15. Ulysses - James Joyce (yes, I know, I'm a sadist)

I'm guessing you mean 'masochist'. Unless you're leaving it in a locked drawer in a communal office, being read out by the robo-voice...

Have kindled Erewhon.

j.mills wrote:

NamelessFaceless wrote:15. Ulysses - James Joyce (yes, I know, I'm a sadist)

I'm guessing you mean 'masochist'. Unless you're leaving it in a locked drawer in a communal office, being read out by the robo-voice...

Yes, that's what I meant.

Ulysses: probably the most over-rated work in literature.

Don't let Animavore hear you say that!

j.mills wrote::o Don't let Animavore hear you say that!

Or me. I'm a card-carrying Joycean.

So, like, when you die they donate your prose to footnotes?

j.mills wrote:So, like, when you die they donate your prose to footnotes?

You have to be quite articulate to convince them to wait until you die.

This is the second time I've recommended this this week here but Darkchilde got me into Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. Hard SF with a scattering of detective thriller thrown in. It's quite short as hard SF goes, but very good.