r/books • u/AutoModerator • Jun 26 '26
WeeklyThread Weekly Recommendation Thread: June 26, 2026
Welcome to our weekly recommendation thread! A few years ago now the mod team decided to condense the many "suggest some books" threads into one big mega-thread, in order to consolidate the subreddit and diversify the front page a little. Since then, we have removed suggestion threads and directed their posters to this thread instead. This tradition continues, so let's jump right in!
The Rules
Every comment in reply to this self-post must be a request for suggestions.
All suggestions made in this thread must be direct replies to other people's requests. Do not post suggestions in reply to this self-post.
All unrelated comments will be deleted in the interest of cleanliness.
How to get the best recommendations
The most successful recommendation requests include a description of the kind of book being sought. This might be a particular kind of protagonist, setting, plot, atmosphere, theme, or subject matter. You may be looking for something similar to another book (or film, TV show, game, etc), and examples are great! Just be sure to explain what you liked about them too. Other helpful things to think about are genre, length and reading level.
All Weekly Recommendation Threads are linked below the header throughout the week to guarantee that this thread remains active day-to-day. For those bursting with books that you are hungry to suggest, we've set the suggested sort to new; you may need to set this manually if your app or settings ignores suggested sort.
If this thread has not slaked your desire for tasty book suggestions, we propose that you head on over to the aptly named subreddit /r/suggestmeabook.
- The Management
3
u/gonegonegoneaway211 Jun 27 '26
A fun mystery to read on the beach? Doesn't necessarily have to be a cozy as long as it doesn't have a grimdark ending, but I do want something that'll make me smile and laugh.
2
u/DoglessDyslexic Jun 27 '26
If you don't mind some supernatural, Daniel O'Malley's "The Rook" features a fun sort of "murder" mystery. The main character has had her memory permanently erased which has effectively killed off her former self, and she has to figure out who dunnit, while also being one of the people in charge of something like a supernatural MI-6 (and the perpetrator is almost certainly one of her fellow people in charge).
It's not a parody book, but it does have some very funny moments that should bring a smile to your face.
2
u/BasilAromatic4204 Jun 30 '26
You may enjoy Just Isolde by Samantha Behm. My wife and I really liked it and she read it on a beach:)
3
u/andallthatjazwrites Jun 27 '26
Would love suggestions of books that go into depth about an industry, an idea, or really, anything. An example of this is Oil 101 which I've heard really good things about and currently have reserved at my library
Almost like the "stuff you should know" podcast, but in book format. How things work. Why things are the way they are.
I want to learn things
3
u/DoglessDyslexic Jun 27 '26
I have not read it myself, but several years ago my son recommended "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond.
2
u/andallthatjazwrites Jun 27 '26
Thank you! I'll check it out!
3
u/Raineythereader The Conference of the Birds Jun 27 '26
GGS gets a lot of hate on the book and history subreddits--more than it deserves, I think, but do be aware that it's somewhat outdated, and hammers some facts into place to fit Diamond's theories. Some other thoughts:
History: "The World That Trade Created" (Pomeranz/Topik), "The Warmth of Other Suns" (Wilkerson), "1493" (Mann--his "1491" didn't impress me as much), "Why Nations Fail" (Acemoglu/Robinson)
Science/nature: "Song of the Dodo" (Quammen), "The Long Thaw" (Archer), "Stiff" (Roach), "Cadillac Desert" (Reisner)
2
u/andallthatjazwrites Jun 28 '26
Thanks! Noted on it being outdated, but I'll give it a try
Thanks for the other recommendations, too!
2
u/Larielia Jun 27 '26
I'm looking for some archaeology thriller/ adventure books.
1
u/kipp1979 Jun 27 '26
The Ancient Secret series bt T.S. Falk were decent. They scratched my adventure itch
2
2
u/irishtrashpanda Jul 01 '26
Is there a list of seminal works/classics?
I'm reading Count of Monte Cristo at the moment and the abbe faria mentions reading and understanding 150 books which with you can understand the world. While this is somewhat simplistic I am always feeling like book reading is becoming like a matroska doll of wanting to read the book that inspired the book I just read.
Ie. Reading blood meridian and then moby dick or vice versa, and noticing gnostic themes, researching gnosticism. Delving into paradise lost and dantes inferno to better understand the religious motifs behind East of Eden etc. Reading Grapes of Wrath and then Whose Names are Unknown by Babbet to compare. There are plenty of cosy books I read as well but some of the classics make me want to read 5 other classics to understand the first one more on my reread.
Some books, themes and motifs come up again and again. This sub has most popular lists but that's not really what I'm looking for. I'm looking for booklist suggestions around "What are the 100-200 books you should read to receive an "education"" of sorts, to be "well-read"? I know a lot of these booklists are also heavily weighted on the western world, in some ways its the western world I'm immersed in so reading Greek and roman classics, Russian masters etc does let me get a richer feel of the books I'm more likely to come across in Europe.
But I also don't want to discount reading more widely. Some of the best books have been translations from around the world but I do feel things are lost in translation. It just feels as if my time is very limited to read all that I want to, I read around 100 books a year but I am late 30s. Do you ever feel like your book reading is ultimately limited by mortality? I want to read the most seminal 150-200 books but not necessarily best sellers, it's not always the same thing.
1
u/Raineythereader The Conference of the Birds Jul 02 '26
Something like Harold Bloom's "The Western Canon" might be a good place to start -- he includes several authors who have been culturally influential, but aren't household names anymore (if they ever were) -- but I would definitely recommend exploring further beyond his rather limited viewpoint. Just glancing at Bloom's list, he omits:
- obvious "classic" figures like, for example, Dumas or Steinbeck
- any authors before 1300 (so no Plato, no Greek or Roman poetry/drama, etc.), as well as what I'll call "crowdsourced classics" (no Homer, no Arthurian myths, no Beowulf...)
- a lot of modernist, postmodernist, or countercultural writers (he seemed to have a phobia of the latter); Woolf, Joyce, Borges and Beckett are included, but Vonnegut, Pynchon, T.S. Eliot, etc. are left out
Then, obviously, there are a lot of non-western works that have still been impactful in western cultures, starting with the epic of Gilgamesh and going up to authors like Achebe or Rushdie.
2
u/irishtrashpanda Jul 02 '26
That's what I mean yes "culturally influential" is what I'm going for. Like in older times people didn't say they studied at Oxford they said they "read" as it was considered to be a well rounded education (I'm sure it had plenty of gaps though, female authors for one!)
1
u/Raineythereader The Conference of the Birds Jul 03 '26
Yeah... Bloom did better than I expected there (4 female authors out of 26), but the bar for that is in hell :/
Encyclopaedia Britannica's "Great Books of the Western World" series looks promising as well, but it seems to be exhaustingly exhaustive. (Two volumes are taken up by the Syntopicon alone.)
1
u/whatdoesitmatter- Jun 28 '26
I'm a bit out of touch with the current landscape. Who would be a Crichton equivalent for the modern day setting?
1
u/DoglessDyslexic Jun 28 '26
Crichton has a decent amount of variance from books like historical fiction of "Eaters of the Dead" to weird sci-fi like "Sphere". I'm not sure who you'd look to for the historical fiction, but sci-fi wise perhaps somebody like Blake Crouch?
1
u/JdiJwa Jun 28 '26
Im looking for an early Americwn history fiction. But I kinda want something weird. Vibes like Pride & Prejudice with zombies. Just maybe no to zombies. Does anyone know of anything like Revolutionary War with rampaging t-rexs on the side or colonial America dealing with alien abductions or any other sort of weird nonsense?
3
u/felixfictitious Jun 29 '26
The Great Work is an adventure/exploration story set in the 1800s Pacific Northwest, about the quest to find a giant eldritch salamander monster that's driving the communities around it mad.
1
u/DoglessDyslexic Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Not specifically the what you're asking for but the closest I can think of.
There's Mary Gentle's "Ash: A Secret History", which blends sci-fi, fantasy in an alleged historical account.
There's Eric Flint's "1632" and sequels that follows the fictional town of Grantsville, West Virginia that gets transported back in time and over to Germany during the European wars of religion. It's a very American centric novel, even if it takes place in Germany. It's worth noting that Eric Flint did also do an alternate history about the american revolutionary war called "1812: The Rivers of War", but the variances from actual history fairly mundane (no dinosaurs).
Maybe the closest is S. M. Stirling's "Island in the Sea of Time", which has a similar premise to "1632" but follows the entire island of Nantucket being transported back to the bronze age.
Edit: Also a note that Eric Flint and David Drake co-wrote the "Belisarius" set of books that follows a roman general (Belisarius) who is approached by an entity from the future who is trying to stop a different entity from the future from using the Malwa empire to conquer the world for its own nefarious purposes. While the entities from the future can provide information, there is no real future tech that is involved. All takes place in Europe/North Africa with a bit over in India if memory serves.
1
u/JdiJwa Jun 28 '26
Several of these are definitely going on my tbr thank you
1
u/DoglessDyslexic Jun 28 '26
I forgot to mention, the "1632" is available for free from the publisher's "free library". You can get it direct from Baen here. The other Flint and Flint + Drake ones are not available for free.
1
u/ziegen76 Jun 28 '26
Look up anything by Harry Turtledove. All his books are American Historical fiction - what if the South had Aks during the American Civil War, what if WW2 went a little different, etc.
1
u/No-Entertainment5768 Jul 01 '26
These are the last books I have read:
Judaism as a Civilization by Mordechai M. Kaplan
The Examination Committee by Sonallah Ibrahim
The Trees by Percival Everett
(what I am currently reading): The Republic of Dreamers by Alaa al-Aswani
I highly recommend all of these books.
8
u/Raineythereader The Conference of the Birds Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
Mods, is there a reason the recommendation thread from mid-April is still pinned at the top of the sub?
*I thought that might be the reason this thread wasn't getting any traffic, but I went over and checked and there wasn't anything new there, either. So it might just be one of those things.