Recommended Novels

24 Jul 2023 02:06

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I have separate recommendations pages for fantasy, mysteries and science fiction. This is for the residual class, of books that don't belong to any of those genres. This includes what I've taken to calling "scientist fiction", stories by non-scientists about the creative lives and travails of scientists. I've marked those as such.

• Iain Banks
  • The Business
  • Whit, or, Isis Amongst the Unsaved
• Andrea Barrett, Ship Fever [Scientist-fiction]
• Bolano, Nazi Literature in the Americas
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe
• A. S. Byatt
  • Angels and Insects
  • Possession
• Calvino
• Joseph Conrad
  • Heart of Darkness
  • Lord Jim
  • Nostromo
• Jenny Davidson, Heredity
• Joan Didion
• Anatole France
• George MacDonald Fraser, The Pyrates
• Amitav Ghosh
  • The Hungry Tide
  • The Ibis trilogy:
    1. Sea of Poppies
    2. River of Smoke
    3. Flood of Fire
• Jiang Rong, Wolf Totem
• Yashar Kemal, Memed, My Hawk
• Victor LaValle, The Devil in Silver
• J. Robert Lennon, Castle
• Amin Maalouf, Ports of Call
• Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West
• Obreht, The Tiger's Wife
• Patrick O'Brian
• Orhan Pamuk
  • My Name Is Red
  • The White Castle
• Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
• Jill Paton Walsh, Knowledge of Angels
• Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey
• Richard Powers
  • Gain
  • The Gold-Bug Variations [Scientist-fiction. Prose almost as dense and slow-reading as pure math; it took me months to read a few hundred pages, and I enjoyed every word.]
• Frederic Prokosch, The Seven Who Fled [Review: Where Every Prospect Pleases, and Every Man Is Vile]
• E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
• Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
• Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette?
• Ivan Turgenev
• Dubravka Ugresic, Fox
• Gore Vidal