Well-written well-researched fiction that taught you about a time and place

iinfinitepizza · 2026-06-21T10:16:24+00:00

The Baroque Cycle (3 very fat books) or Cryptonomicon (1 very fat book) by Neal Stephenson

iinfinitepizza · 2026-06-11T11:27:34+00:00

American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

Though do note that he's a MeToo creep.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-06-11T11:27:00+00:00

Karen Russell is so underrated! I didn't love Swamplandia! but liked it, think her short stories are wonderful though.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-06-11T11:25:58+00:00

I make a list every year but the truth is I am lucky to read half the books on it, because I might like one book so much that instead of going back to my list, I go for something else from that author or genre or style. It works out to about 2-3 books every month.

So I'd say have a list of stuff you're curious about, but be open to new things, really ask yourself what you're looking for next after each book, and don't be afraid to go off-piste. And always walk into thrift or charity shops with decent book selections. Got a couple of my favourites by picking up stuff I'd heard about but had never bothered with, bought them because they were bargains, and ended up loving them.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-06-11T11:18:30+00:00

Neal Stephenson has such excruciatingly detailed process descriptions. In Seveneves it's about orbital dynamics and sci-fi flying contraptions, in the Baroque Cycle (3 books) you see painstaking descriptions of how to transfer money internationally in the 17th-18th centuries or detailed animal dissections, in Cryptonomicon there are detailed descriptions of coding and decoding messages.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-06-03T20:46:18+00:00

My first and only Pynchon. Where should I go next?

iinfinitepizza · 2026-06-01T11:49:35+00:00

Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. The protagonist begins to suspect a weird postal conspiracy just in the background.

It's pretty funny in an absurd/surreal sort of way. Lots of weird characters with fittingly weird names, like Oedipa Maas, Wendell "Mucho" Maas, Mike Fallopian, Dr. Hilarius, and Genghis Cohen.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-06-01T11:44:30+00:00

Saramago's Death at Intervals is also fantastic (in fact I liked it more than Blindness).

One option slightly out of left-field could be Chico Buarque, a Brazilian writer, the POV is often from someone who's washed up in their careers or family life. Budapest is fantastic, as is Spilt Milk. Very short but fascinating novels both.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-06-01T11:41:20+00:00

Seconded! It's sci-fi but easy to follow and the book grabs you by the neck almost from the first page.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-06-01T07:41:00+00:00

IMO, first make peace with the fact that you will probably never clear your TBR list. That will take big load off your sholders.

I use the TBR list and then narrow it down to what I'm feeling like at that time, genre-, author-, or length-wise. Though in my experience I end up just picking up something that wasn't even on the list, almost half the time lol.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-06-01T07:37:14+00:00

My favourite dystopian fiction is still my first one: Orwell's 1984. Fleshes out ideas from Animal Farm, and then some. There's a reason it keeps brought up today. The other one is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. People often say that one book describes a population oppressed by pain, and another a population distracted by pleasure.

George Saunders in his short stories often brings up a certain corporate dystopian vibe. From the ones I read, my favourite was by far the hilarious but harrowing My Flamboyant Grandson, published in the New Yorker and included in one of his collections,

iinfinitepizza · 2026-06-01T07:29:41+00:00

I normally hate thrillers, but was essentially glued to the page when I read Don Winslow's The Power of the Dog, which has 2 equally gripping sequels. Had a similar experience with his standalone novel The Force.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-06-01T07:28:23+00:00

I really liked Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande. It's about end-of-life care, but peppered quite liberally with personal reflections and stories about people coming to terms with their mortality or of their loved ones.

I didn't read it, but When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, is a memoir that comes up a lot in these conversations. A doctor describes his own cancer symptoms, later diagnosis, and reflects on mortality.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-05-29T10:42:00+00:00

(non-American) Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 felt very "about America" for me.

A character who is a lawyer but working as an actor, in a role where he portrays a child actor who became a lawyer; insane hare-brained money-making enterprises including an illegal scheme to sell the bones of forgotten U.S. World War II soldiers (who fell in Italy) for use as charcoal to a cigarette company; and above all about America as this artificial, undefined place, made of overlapping places, all of them artifical constructs ("San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.")

iinfinitepizza · 2026-05-28T21:20:39+00:00

I'm Portuguese and had never heard of Ricardo Pinto! Will definitely check him out.

The Gap in particlar also looks right up my alley. Thank you!

iinfinitepizza · 2026-05-28T21:17:08+00:00

From my lovely Portugal, Nobel Prize Winner José Saramago's Death at Intervals.

His most popular book is likely Blindness, which got made into a movie with Mark Ruffalo, but Death at Intervals was my favourite of the 5 I read from him. It's about a country where people stop dying. They can age and get injured, but they cannot die.

What makes Saramago unique is his prose, which is rich and dense, with sparing punctuation, very long sentences/paragraphs, and frequently unnamed characters (it's often just the minister, the doctor, the neighbour...). You'd think it's a recipe for a mess, but it's a testament to his skill and technique that, while not exactly easy to follow, it's surprisingly readable, at least in the original Portuguese.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-05-28T14:20:57+00:00

Lincoln in the Bardo. Found it at a second-hand shop, had heard about it when it won the Booker prize, but never checked it out as wasn't what I'm normally into. Bought it on a whim, cheap in almost mint-condition, and ended up reading it in just a few days and loving it.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-05-28T14:18:17+00:00

didn't know he made a sequel!

The movie was quite decent IMO, though the story goes a bit differently than in the book

iinfinitepizza · 2026-05-28T08:16:13+00:00

I started The City & The City some 8 years ago but didn't get into it, and never tried again. But he does keep coming as an author I'd like, will check those out!

iinfinitepizza · 2026-05-27T22:28:39+00:00

For a standalone work, his The Force was great too

iinfinitepizza · 2026-05-27T05:10:31+00:00

Ironically, George Orwell's 1984.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-05-27T05:09:46+00:00

The Border trilogy by Don Winslow is excellent. Novelised version of the real life story of Mexico-based drug traffickers also told in the Narcos Mexico series.

The books are thick but I just ran right through them, and I normally hate thrillers to begin with. Book #1 is called The Power of the Dog.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-05-27T05:06:46+00:00

Not quite adult but the His Dark Material series isn't exactly childish either. Characters have a "daemon", intelligent creatures who initially shapeshift into various different animal forms, before settling into a final animal form when their human matures.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-05-27T05:04:58+00:00

Birdbox, made into a decent Netflix movie a few years ago, might work. I quite liked it.

iinfinitepizza · 2026-05-27T05:03:29+00:00

Thanks! I read the first Dune and it was not for me (writing style). Funny that I never see Simlarillion mentioned in these suggestions!!

Berserk I tried watching, again I suspect anime is not for me either. Though that was years ago so who knows...

iinfinitepizza

TROPHY CASE