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 ↩︎
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A young man comes of age in the aftermath of the Spanish civil war. It's a beautifully written work of magical realism, a subgenre of realistic fiction that incorporates supernatural elements in an unobtrusive way. It is very much not a YA novel despite the main character being an adolescent.
Flatland - Edwin Abbot
Written in 1884 this is a pretty weird story about a two dimensional person encoutering a three dimensional person. One part social commentary about class and gender, one part uhh... science fiction? Math fiction? Geometric philisophical allegory? It's pretty short and its value as a cultural artifact alone makes it worth the read.
Changing Planes - Ursula K. Le Guin
A collection of short stories that are strung together by the oddball premise that air travel was so dull that people started slipping into different worlds out of sheer boredom. Each story acts as a study of a society different from ours in some fantastical way. My favorite is the one where people share a single communal dream every night.