This isn't a classic at all and I'm not even sure if I would suggest you read it but I found a book at a junk parade that my local town puts on, and it's from the 1920s. It's called commerce and industry.
It's a textbook, it says it's by Henry Holt and company.
It's a very interesting read and talks about things like how American coal production cannot continue how it has, or how Germany is going to become an industrial powerhouse as a result of its debt, and that that's a mistake, and that we need a league of nations to prevent them from going to war again.
It's a little snapshot of what people thought about the world back in 1920, and it's an amazing little book to look at as a result.
I really enjoyed Maurice Druon's The Accursed Kings series. George R.R. Martin wrote the forward to the (recent) English version and says that it served as an inspiration for A Song of Ice and Fire. I haven't actually read any Martin because I don't want to dive into a series I don't really believe will ever be finished, but I ripped through The Accursed Kings like wildfire.
Gore Vidal's Julian is another historical fiction work that I liked a lot.
I don't often see it discussed, but The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger is amazing. It has a SF premise, but it is really a story about relationships and dealing with the inevitable.
Be prepared to be sad for a while at the end.
Red Moon and Black Mountain is a fantasy novel by Joy Chant, published in 1970. It is well written and has a compelling story. Many believed it to be influenced by Tolkien, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I believe it is out of print now, so it might be hard to track down, unless you're willing to buy a used copy.
I read all three of Chant's fantasy novels, and this first one is by far her best.
I was always a bigger fan of Ira Levin's "This Perfect Day" over similar more popular dystopian novels like "1984" and "Brave New Wolrd." It felt edgier and more relevant to modern society. I'm surprised to see it's never being mentioned anywhere.
The Prince of Nothing series by R. Scott Bakker is a pretty unique fantasy story. It's not 100% conceptually original in every way (what fantasy series is) but the author mixes philosophy into the work in a really novel way. It's almost like he took philosophical concepts and placed them in his world as these tangible objects and characters.
It's a good mix of that, along with Dune, Wheel of Time and maybe some Warhammer grim-dark type atmosphere.
Also, Gene Wolf's "Solar Cycle" trilogy is good if you are a fan of fantasy and sci-fi. He has a very approachable style that's easy to read and the concepts in the book are neat.
Steinbeck is incredibly popular and a number of his books are absolute classics: Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden... I think his novel Tortilla Flats is his most overlooked work. It's fun and engaging and focuses on a community that is often underrepresented in the history of the American West, the Californios/Paisanos. it's a hoot.
I also like to point folks towards George Orwell's non-fiction. Homage to Catalonia, Down and Out in London and Paris.
Less Well Known Authors
The Island of Sea Women is an incredible historical fiction narrative about the small Island of Jeju in Korea and the Haenyeo that live and work there. 10/10 my favorite book I read in 2021. There are some pretty graphic passages but it's a beautiful, slightly morbid read. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy.
The Empyrion Saga by Stephen R. Lawhead is a 2 novel science fiction series about an obscure author who is sent to a lost colony to find out what happened to it.
I've never seen it mentioned in beloved classics (it was written in 1985) but I've read it multiple times and have really enjoyed the characters and story progression.
Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes. It's a romance novel published in 1880 by a female telegraph operator. The romance and plot is good not great, but I found it incredibly engrossing sociological. It's about how Miss Nathalie Rogers finds love "over the wire". She forms a romantic connection with a man she's never met in-person through near-instantaneous communication via telegraph.
I first read the book when cellphones were really taking off and more and more people began to have online relationships. A lot of old timers told me humans just can't form a real connection through texting, yet here was a romance from the 1800s that began with near-instantaneous long-distance communication! It also made people in the past feel a lot real to me; humans are still fundamentally human.
Vernor Vinge has two lesser known books that I think are great: A Deepness in the Sky & A Fire Upon the Deep
It's YA stuff and potentially more popular than Vinge, but Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series (Over Sea, Under Stone; The Dark is Rising; Greenwitch; The Grey King; & Silver on the Tree) is fantastic IMO.
Finally, they're not super well known, but I value them because my fourth grade teacher who got me interested in reading introduced me to them: Terry Brooks' Magic Kingdom of Landover series is all right.
I really enjoyed the Alexandria Quartet by Durrell which was written in the 1950s/1960s. The books are set around WW1 and WW2 in Alexandria, Egypt under the very volatile end of the British colonial rule there. It's a big ball of romantic drama all told by different characters in each book. Durrell spent time living in Alexandria and it's also a love letter to the city.
I'm sure I have a few more buried deep in the recesses of my creaky brain, but I was just reminded of Margaret Atwood's books besides The Handmaid's Tale. I really liked her Oryx and Crake trilogy -- I don't remember why I picked it up at the time, but I really got into it and was surprised that I had never heard or read anything about them before. I liked The Robber Bride well enough, but it's one of my wife's favorites.
I mentioned this recently in another thread, but Dealing with Dragons and Searching for Dragons by Patricia C Wrede. They are YA but don't read dumbed-down or trite like a lot of fiction for young people. They are a feminist telling of a classic-style fantasy adventure story, with a lot of clever humor. As a kid I avoided reading books aimed at my age range but I read these on the recommendation of my male cousin (important because these books are definitely not just aimed at girls) and I still own copies and reread them every few years.
Another feminist (and pro-LGB ((TQIA doesn't really get brought up, but half of the series was written in the 70s and the other half in the 90s ))) SF/Fantasy series by Suzy McKee Charnas, the Holdfast Chronicles: Walk to the End of the World, Motherlines, The Furies, and The Conqueror's Child. Like The Handmaid's Tale, it's a dystopian future where women have been enslaved, so not something to read if you aren't in the mood for trauma. It doesn't make the women perfect innocent victims, and it shows how the Uber-Patriarchy is nearly as damaging to the men as the women.
This book was originally written in 1980 and titled America Now but renamed and had an additional introduction written in 1987 which is the version I have read.
In it, Harris shares the web of events and changes to American culture post World War II that lead to where we were in 1980 (and honestly, what impressed me the most, where we still are in many ways today in 2023). The explanations and connections are well thought out and researched (extensive citations are provided). The topics covered run the gamut from conglomerates and shoddy products, to the rise of feminism, the Stonewall riots and the "gays coming out of the closet", all the way to cults and born again Christians.
At the end, Harris provides some suggestions for ways to start to fix some of these issues. Things I wished people would've heeded 40 years ago, to be honest.
A book I particularly love but that I don't see mentioned in a lot of places is Le Ton beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter. Hofstadter is reasonably well-known, I think, for Gödel, Escher, Bach, but Le Ton beau de Marot is also excellent and covers similar but distinct ground.
I developed a much deeper appreciation for poetry from reading the book, and I was deeply touched by its expression of love for Hofstadter's wife. There's an emotional component, especially in the later parts of the book, that grounds the discussion of language and poetry.
I can't even sum up the book adequately because it's so sprawling, while nevertheless remaining centered on poetry and language. I really recommend reading and experiencing it yourself.
A dystopian novel that explores the consequences of a second American Civil War in the late 21st century through the experiences of a young girl named Sarat Chestnut.
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. The book is drawn and laid out like a comic book, very easy to read and understand. It explains the medium of sequential art through sequential art. Instead of simply reading about what effect some technique is supposed to achieve and looking at some diagrams (like in a textbook), you actually experience it as you're reading about it which is very cool.
The book is actually quite well-known among comic book fans but less widely known outside of them. It has a sequel, Reinventing Comics that goes into the business side of the comic book industry.
Isaac Asimov is best known for his fiction work, but the man wrote an astonishing amount of non-fiction including a lot of popular science (though much of that is outdated nowadays). Two of his non-fiction works I rather like though is:
Asimov's Guide to the Bible
Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare
These are pretty big tomes, but I wouldn't exactly call them "academic" work. They're certainly not super rigorous, but there's a lot of really interesting insights in these books as he dissects the different works pointing out their historical context, interesting facts and his interpretations of certain things. The Shakespeare one in particular is organized in an interesting way which you don't normally see elsewhere.
I don't know if its well known or not among people who aren't history nerds, but The Golden Ass is the only complete surviving Roman novel. It's about a Greek youth who dabbles in witchcraft, gets transformed into a donkey, and narrates a series of extremely bawdy misadventures as he passes from owner to owner. It's not for the faint of heart, but it's surprisingly readable and funny for something 2000 years old.
I'm not sure how popular this is outside the German speaking countries, but I have nothing but praise for Hermann Hesse's 1922 novel Siddhartha. There is an English translation available and it is an amazing novel about self discovery.
Written in 1909 and it has some REALLY eerie connections to life today and where we're headed, it's only 45 pages and $1 on Amazon (and most likely on Project Gutenberg, since its over 100 years old).
This book is guaranteed to make you angry at the world. Especially the scientific world, we've just forgot 50% of the population because they're "too hard" to study because of hormonal changes and variance.
The painter Denton Welch started writing in 1935 after he was hit by a car on his bicycle. He was 20 years old. He never fully recovered from the injury, but it gave us the three most acutely felt novels that I've ever read: Maiden Voyage, In Youth is Pleasure, and A Voice Through a Cloud.
I've heard him called the "gay writer's gay writer," which I can immediately recognize as true without being able to articulate why that's the case. The back of my copy of Maiden Voyage really plays this up, saying that archival papers show that Winston Churchill's secretary was determined to get a copy when it came out because it "reeked of homosexuality." William S. Burroughs dedicated a book to him, saying he was the one writer he respected more than any other. The two of them could not be more different. But queer people understand Denton.
So what is in these novels, anyway? Each one is basically the same. A barely-fictionalized Denton walks around. Sometimes, he's even named Denton. He looks at and touches a lot of antiques. There's no plot in the conventional sense and barely anything happens. Something has happened sometimes, such as in Maiden Voyage's unforgettable first line: "After I had run away from school, no one knew what to do with me." But we're not shown any of that. All we're shown is Denton going from place to place, touching fabrics and looking at doll houses. You get the sense that he could fall apart at any minute. He is unbelievably fragile, but not because he's moody. It's in his perspective. Nothing happens, and you still get the sense that he's going to cry on the next page.
Sinbad and Me by Kin Platt is a YA novel from my youth that enthralls without needing a Sci-Fi or fantasy setting. As a historical piece, it still holds interest today.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1429033.Sinbad_and_Me
This isn't a classic at all and I'm not even sure if I would suggest you read it but I found a book at a junk parade that my local town puts on, and it's from the 1920s. It's called commerce and industry.
It's a textbook, it says it's by Henry Holt and company.
It's a very interesting read and talks about things like how American coal production cannot continue how it has, or how Germany is going to become an industrial powerhouse as a result of its debt, and that that's a mistake, and that we need a league of nations to prevent them from going to war again.
It's a little snapshot of what people thought about the world back in 1920, and it's an amazing little book to look at as a result.
Generation X by Douglas Coupland is 30 years old, but it still captures the struggle to feel like a human rather than a commodity.
I really enjoyed Maurice Druon's The Accursed Kings series. George R.R. Martin wrote the forward to the (recent) English version and says that it served as an inspiration for A Song of Ice and Fire. I haven't actually read any Martin because I don't want to dive into a series I don't really believe will ever be finished, but I ripped through The Accursed Kings like wildfire.
Gore Vidal's Julian is another historical fiction work that I liked a lot.
I don't often see it discussed, but The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger is amazing. It has a SF premise, but it is really a story about relationships and dealing with the inevitable.
Be prepared to be sad for a while at the end.
Red Moon and Black Mountain is a fantasy novel by Joy Chant, published in 1970. It is well written and has a compelling story. Many believed it to be influenced by Tolkien, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I believe it is out of print now, so it might be hard to track down, unless you're willing to buy a used copy.
I read all three of Chant's fantasy novels, and this first one is by far her best.
I was always a bigger fan of Ira Levin's "This Perfect Day" over similar more popular dystopian novels like "1984" and "Brave New Wolrd." It felt edgier and more relevant to modern society. I'm surprised to see it's never being mentioned anywhere.
The Prince of Nothing series by R. Scott Bakker is a pretty unique fantasy story. It's not 100% conceptually original in every way (what fantasy series is) but the author mixes philosophy into the work in a really novel way. It's almost like he took philosophical concepts and placed them in his world as these tangible objects and characters.
It's a good mix of that, along with Dune, Wheel of Time and maybe some Warhammer grim-dark type atmosphere.
Also, Gene Wolf's "Solar Cycle" trilogy is good if you are a fan of fantasy and sci-fi. He has a very approachable style that's easy to read and the concepts in the book are neat.
Famous Authors, Less Famous Books
Steinbeck is incredibly popular and a number of his books are absolute classics: Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden... I think his novel Tortilla Flats is his most overlooked work. It's fun and engaging and focuses on a community that is often underrepresented in the history of the American West, the Californios/Paisanos. it's a hoot.
I also like to point folks towards George Orwell's non-fiction. Homage to Catalonia, Down and Out in London and Paris.
Less Well Known Authors
The Island of Sea Women is an incredible historical fiction narrative about the small Island of Jeju in Korea and the Haenyeo that live and work there. 10/10 my favorite book I read in 2021. There are some pretty graphic passages but it's a beautiful, slightly morbid read. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy.
The Empyrion Saga by Stephen R. Lawhead is a 2 novel science fiction series about an obscure author who is sent to a lost colony to find out what happened to it.
I've never seen it mentioned in beloved classics (it was written in 1985) but I've read it multiple times and have really enjoyed the characters and story progression.
Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes. It's a romance novel published in 1880 by a female telegraph operator. The romance and plot is good not great, but I found it incredibly engrossing sociological. It's about how Miss Nathalie Rogers finds love "over the wire". She forms a romantic connection with a man she's never met in-person through near-instantaneous communication via telegraph.
I first read the book when cellphones were really taking off and more and more people began to have online relationships. A lot of old timers told me humans just can't form a real connection through texting, yet here was a romance from the 1800s that began with near-instantaneous long-distance communication! It also made people in the past feel a lot real to me; humans are still fundamentally human.
Vernor Vinge has two lesser known books that I think are great: A Deepness in the Sky & A Fire Upon the Deep
It's YA stuff and potentially more popular than Vinge, but Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series (Over Sea, Under Stone; The Dark is Rising; Greenwitch; The Grey King; & Silver on the Tree) is fantastic IMO.
Finally, they're not super well known, but I value them because my fourth grade teacher who got me interested in reading introduced me to them: Terry Brooks' Magic Kingdom of Landover series is all right.
I really enjoyed the Alexandria Quartet by Durrell which was written in the 1950s/1960s. The books are set around WW1 and WW2 in Alexandria, Egypt under the very volatile end of the British colonial rule there. It's a big ball of romantic drama all told by different characters in each book. Durrell spent time living in Alexandria and it's also a love letter to the city.
I'm sure I have a few more buried deep in the recesses of my creaky brain, but I was just reminded of Margaret Atwood's books besides The Handmaid's Tale. I really liked her Oryx and Crake trilogy -- I don't remember why I picked it up at the time, but I really got into it and was surprised that I had never heard or read anything about them before. I liked The Robber Bride well enough, but it's one of my wife's favorites.
I mentioned this recently in another thread, but Dealing with Dragons and Searching for Dragons by Patricia C Wrede. They are YA but don't read dumbed-down or trite like a lot of fiction for young people. They are a feminist telling of a classic-style fantasy adventure story, with a lot of clever humor. As a kid I avoided reading books aimed at my age range but I read these on the recommendation of my male cousin (important because these books are definitely not just aimed at girls) and I still own copies and reread them every few years.
Another feminist (and pro-LGB ((TQIA doesn't really get brought up, but half of the series was written in the 70s and the other half in the 90s ))) SF/Fantasy series by Suzy McKee Charnas, the Holdfast Chronicles: Walk to the End of the World, Motherlines, The Furies, and The Conqueror's Child. Like The Handmaid's Tale, it's a dystopian future where women have been enslaved, so not something to read if you aren't in the mood for trauma. It doesn't make the women perfect innocent victims, and it shows how the Uber-Patriarchy is nearly as damaging to the men as the women.
I'm going to go in a different direction and recommend a non-fiction book.
Why Nothing Works by Marvin Harris
This book was originally written in 1980 and titled America Now but renamed and had an additional introduction written in 1987 which is the version I have read.
In it, Harris shares the web of events and changes to American culture post World War II that lead to where we were in 1980 (and honestly, what impressed me the most, where we still are in many ways today in 2023). The explanations and connections are well thought out and researched (extensive citations are provided). The topics covered run the gamut from conglomerates and shoddy products, to the rise of feminism, the Stonewall riots and the "gays coming out of the closet", all the way to cults and born again Christians.
At the end, Harris provides some suggestions for ways to start to fix some of these issues. Things I wished people would've heeded 40 years ago, to be honest.
A book I particularly love but that I don't see mentioned in a lot of places is Le Ton beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter. Hofstadter is reasonably well-known, I think, for Gödel, Escher, Bach, but Le Ton beau de Marot is also excellent and covers similar but distinct ground.
On its face, Le Ton beau de Marot is a book about translating between different languages. Hofstadter takes a small, elegant poem by Clément Marot and uses different translations of it as jumping-off points for exploration of the many dimensions of translation. But while it discusses translation, the book also examines language itself, thought, communication, self-awareness, poetry, and Hofstadter's love for his deceased wife. Everything is woven together as parts of a unified whole.
I developed a much deeper appreciation for poetry from reading the book, and I was deeply touched by its expression of love for Hofstadter's wife. There's an emotional component, especially in the later parts of the book, that grounds the discussion of language and poetry.
I can't even sum up the book adequately because it's so sprawling, while nevertheless remaining centered on poetry and language. I really recommend reading and experiencing it yourself.
American War by Omar El Akkad
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. The book is drawn and laid out like a comic book, very easy to read and understand. It explains the medium of sequential art through sequential art. Instead of simply reading about what effect some technique is supposed to achieve and looking at some diagrams (like in a textbook), you actually experience it as you're reading about it which is very cool.
The book is actually quite well-known among comic book fans but less widely known outside of them. It has a sequel, Reinventing Comics that goes into the business side of the comic book industry.
Isaac Asimov is best known for his fiction work, but the man wrote an astonishing amount of non-fiction including a lot of popular science (though much of that is outdated nowadays). Two of his non-fiction works I rather like though is:
Asimov's Guide to the Bible
Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare
These are pretty big tomes, but I wouldn't exactly call them "academic" work. They're certainly not super rigorous, but there's a lot of really interesting insights in these books as he dissects the different works pointing out their historical context, interesting facts and his interpretations of certain things. The Shakespeare one in particular is organized in an interesting way which you don't normally see elsewhere.
I don't know if its well known or not among people who aren't history nerds, but The Golden Ass is the only complete surviving Roman novel. It's about a Greek youth who dabbles in witchcraft, gets transformed into a donkey, and narrates a series of extremely bawdy misadventures as he passes from owner to owner. It's not for the faint of heart, but it's surprisingly readable and funny for something 2000 years old.
I'm not sure how popular this is outside the German speaking countries, but I have nothing but praise for Hermann Hesse's 1922 novel Siddhartha. There is an English translation available and it is an amazing novel about self discovery.
The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster
Written in 1909 and it has some REALLY eerie connections to life today and where we're headed, it's only 45 pages and $1 on Amazon (and most likely on Project Gutenberg, since its over 100 years old).
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez
This book is guaranteed to make you angry at the world. Especially the scientific world, we've just forgot 50% of the population because they're "too hard" to study because of hormonal changes and variance.
The painter Denton Welch started writing in 1935 after he was hit by a car on his bicycle. He was 20 years old. He never fully recovered from the injury, but it gave us the three most acutely felt novels that I've ever read: Maiden Voyage, In Youth is Pleasure, and A Voice Through a Cloud.
I've heard him called the "gay writer's gay writer," which I can immediately recognize as true without being able to articulate why that's the case. The back of my copy of Maiden Voyage really plays this up, saying that archival papers show that Winston Churchill's secretary was determined to get a copy when it came out because it "reeked of homosexuality." William S. Burroughs dedicated a book to him, saying he was the one writer he respected more than any other. The two of them could not be more different. But queer people understand Denton.
So what is in these novels, anyway? Each one is basically the same. A barely-fictionalized Denton walks around. Sometimes, he's even named Denton. He looks at and touches a lot of antiques. There's no plot in the conventional sense and barely anything happens. Something has happened sometimes, such as in Maiden Voyage's unforgettable first line: "After I had run away from school, no one knew what to do with me." But we're not shown any of that. All we're shown is Denton going from place to place, touching fabrics and looking at doll houses. You get the sense that he could fall apart at any minute. He is unbelievably fragile, but not because he's moody. It's in his perspective. Nothing happens, and you still get the sense that he's going to cry on the next page.
I recommend him.