originally posted in the megathread but want to make this a more active plea.
seeing the current 'YA good classics boring' discourse on the timeline is making me negatively polarized into finally sitting down and locking in. a lot of people are unread and proud at the moment and I'm embarrassed to be in the same general set as them. I'm a manga/LN/WN/fanfic-head, I used to be an avid reader as a pre-tween (like, 6-8) but all I really remember out of my childhood escapades is Hitchhiker's Guide and fucking Hatchet, and then I got the 'lazy student sparknotes' bug in middle school, and now my primary engagement with reading is stuff published by others online (homestuck (regrettably), parahumans, perusing mangadex and ao3, etc.)
please share your recommendations, I'm grabbing what I know but I want to broaden my horizons here. doesn't have to be the classics exactly, just, like, serious (don't know how else to describe it). I'm not trying to be elitist, really just want to be better read.
current backlog thus far obtained purely through osmosis, very little prior interaction:
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
- Three-Body Problem – Liu Cixin
- House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
- White Noise – Don Delillo
- American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
- Dune – Frank Herbert
- Ulysses – James Joyce
- The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin
- One-Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez[1]
- Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
- The City and The City – China Miéville
- October – China Miéville
edit: that's a lot of recs! keep em coming, I very much appreciate it 
I'm gonna wait till I have a chunk of time to parse through these before I further fill out my backlog here
rec'd to me by this thread ↩︎
I'll second or third or whatever all your recommendations of the Dispossessed. Probably my favorite fiction book. Also, Fight Club and a Vonnegut book.
To give you some choices folks haven't laid out yet:
The Fifth Season by NK Jemsin is a good take on common fantasy tropes, with a lot of challenging the reader with themes of ecology and oppression.
You already have a China Miéville book, and October is good, but I'd really recommend Perdido Street Station. It's more the style of book Miéville is known for with his neat blending of sci-fi and fantasy along with his really baroque writing style.
Perdido Street Station is good. Read the cws though, it's got some real rough moments.
The City and The City is my favorite Miéville book though. It's pure, uncut pornography for Anthropologists that shows the enormous power of culture better than anything lese I've ever read.