Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata is a japanese novel about a woman whos worked at a convenience store for 19 years and how shes a little fucked up. Its not that long so it might be good for trying to break back into this ' Words ' shit.

All Tomorrows by C M Koseman is a 'speculative evolution' science fiction genre book about how different species of humans evolved after aliens came in and messed with them genetically, its a little bit ooey gooey icky but with a hopeful tone of the Indomitability of The Human Spirit. Its also written in the perspective of a sort of historical account.

I havent actually read it but, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski sounds like a very cool surreal story that plays with the formatting of the book. Though this does require you to get a physical real copy to experience the full effect. Typing that last sentence i just remembered the existence of 'The Library', making getting a real copy a lot easier than i implied it to be. Im too ebookpilled

I’ve been reading sci fi recently. Some good ones:

The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell. In the near-ish future an inhabited alien planet is discovered and while the rest of the world is debating what to do the Society of Jesus just send their own mission in secret. Forty years later (only a few for him, due to relativity), the only surviving member of the mission is returned home and hidden away by his fellow Jesuits as they try to get out of him what happened.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers. In the spacefuture a young woman from Mars spends what money she has from her family fortune to change her identity and get away to join the crew of ship that bores the hyperspace tunnels that are used to travel faster than light. The crew is a bunch of different species and backgrounds and Rosemary has to learn a lot to fit in with them as the owner of the ship takes on a risky job.

Hard to Be a God - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. An extremely Soviet sci fi novel where the speculative technology being examined is historial materialism. The main character is a historian, not in that he studies the past but that he studies historical processes on alien planets that have not yet developed into a communist utopia. He is stationed in a medieval society and starts to see what he sees as a growing fascist movement. His superiors dismiss this as that’s impossible. Fascism arises as a reaction to capitalism; it cannot happen in a feudal society. But it is happening.

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula Le Guin. A human from Earth is sent to a planet to invite them to join the space UN. The people on Gethen are not sexually dimorphic (bisexual is the term the novel uses, it was written in the sixties) and neither male nor female most of the time. They instead have a monthly cycle where they, for a few days, develop either male or female sexual characteristics, different every month with no particular pattern. He has to navigate the politics of Gethen while finding it difficult to understand its people.

The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin. A physicist was born on an anarchist lunar commune and struggles to pursue his research there due to politicking and his communal obligations that prevent him from working on it. His research attracts attention back on the main planet, a capitalist society, and he travels there to be able to pursue it unhindered, but soon finds himself even more disgusted with that society.

And some fantasy:

The Discworld series as a whole - Terry Pratchett. Just wonderful books. I would say Guards! Guards! is a good starting point.

Other Words for Smoke - Sarah Maria Griffin. A teenage brother and sister are dumped on their aunt for summer, who lives in a big old house. Their aunt, it turns out, is a witch with a talking cat, and the girl (a few years older than the kids) who lives in the other wing of the house is feeding meat to something that lives in the walls called Sweet James in exchange for visits to a hidden world. Sweet James starts asking for bits of the kids.

The Earthsea books - Ursula Le Guin again. Each book follows a different plot but the series pivots around the journeys of a wizard named Ged. Or Duny. Or Sparrowhawk. Or Hawk. Names are important in this series and most characters have several. Ged is only really the protagonist of the first novel, A Wizard of Earthsea that goes from his childhood to going to a school for wizards, where he fucks up massively and has to spend the rest of the novel dealing with the consequences of. I particularly love the second and fourth novels, The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu, which focus on Tenar, a girl who was raised to be the high priestess of a death cult, and who was very certain of her place in the world and of who and what she was as that priestess until Ged shows up.

just scanning my shelves now trying to remember anything that I might have called good.

The World War Z book is nothing like the movie, its actually good. It takes place after the whole zombie apocalypse is already finished and society is restructuring, from the perspective of the in universe author interviewing people about their experiences of it. I thought it was pretty interesting and unique when I first read it, but that was a while ago so idk if it still holdsup.

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson is a pretty funny novel that does what it says on the tin. It is also a historical fiction where the Old Man recounts his life and reveals he is indirectly responsible for a lot of the big events of World War 2.

The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan is a novel i had to read for 6th Year english class, and its actually pretty good. An intensely irish story set during the recession, each of the 21 chapters is from the perspective of a different person in a small irish town and each one of them has their own fucked up things happening to them. Very depressing, but its also written in irish vernacular english and slang, which might be fun and interesting to read.

Here are my two favorite books:

The Darkness that Comes Before by R Scott Bakker. This one is kind of a doorstopper, it's really long, but I found it very engrossing. It's Fantasy set in a huge world and sort of has a vibe of like... A Song of Ice And Fire in that it's about huge factions vying with each other on a global scale, with some lovecraftian cosmic horror scattered in.

Another one that I always recommend is The Name of the Wind by patrick rothfuss. It's also fantasy, But it's more of an adventure type book.

In addition to agreeing with vopoplar's recs of anything by le guin, i've also got:

Gideon the Night by Tamsyn Muir - Science fiction fantasy novel mystery about a gay sword girl and her goth necromancer hate-girlfriend.

The Name of the Wind by Patric Rothfuss - Lovely fantasy story about a guy who loves music and also is learning magic at a school far more interesting than a certain Terf Wizard School author's.

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine - Science fiction epic about an empire and how that empire affects the rest of the galaxy. Very good politics.

Ancilliary Justice by Anne Leckie - A fragment of a destroyed ship AI seeks justice for the rest of their ship being destroyed. Also the empire that owned the ship doesn't distinguish gender at all which is cool.

god i love name of the wind

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas is a wide ranging overview of slot machines and the people involved with them, like designers, gamblers, casino operators, regulators, executives etc. It's shockingly deep on the subject while also being clear and easy to read. And also like, apocalyptic.

You understand by reading it that the effect slot machines have on people is that they'll sit at them and don't want to be disturbed, and keep spending to the point where they can't gamble any more money. All the rest of the people in the book who aren't gamblers construct elaborate fantasies where that's not what this is all about.

Once you read it you start seeing slot machines everywhere, like so many things function like a slot machine does. So many things are allowed to exist using similar methods to how slot machines work. It can be a very depressing book, but there's something extremely illuminating about it. I came out it feeling better prepared to live life in the world the way it is.