I love your takes on twilight, do you have recommendations for other books?
I'll divide this into authors, titles, and playwrights, since there are some authors I blanket recommend, and reading a play is very different from reading a book.
Also, wrote this one on the fly so there are probably many I missed, but now you have recs.
Agatha Christie
Christie is remembered by most for her ability to create compelling mysteries and zany detectives, but she had many other qualities. Chiefly among them, her ability to create amazing characters. Recommended works:
And Then There Were None. Ten seemingly random people are gathered on an island, and start dying one by one.
Crooked House. The usual Christie dysfunctional family, one of my favorites. One of Christie's as well.
Curtain. Poirot finds the perfect murderer.
Ordeal by Innocence. Two years earlier, a murder was committed. The victim's son was convicted of the crime, and hanged in spite of his insistence that he has an alibi, guys!! Totes!! Well, cut to present day, and the alibi hears about this case, realizes "whoopsie doo, that was me, wasn't it. Well I better tell the family they sent their brother to the gallows and the culprit is still alive and most likely one of them. I love doing good deeds like that. :)"
The Mirror Crack'd. One of Christie's later novels, this one is among my favorites for its character creation. It has a very good sideplot of old lady detective Miss Marple finally getting the kind of old where she's not just a zany old lady, but old as in can't live alone and people tell her all the things she can't do, and she's furious about it.
Amalie Skram
Radical feminist 19th century realist author. Particular titles I recommend include:
Forraadt (Autobiographical novel about a young woman completely unprepared for the horrors of marriage. Places a magnifying glass on the hardships upper-class woman had to endure in their marriage)
Professor Hieronimus (A woman reluctantly agrees to submit herself to an asylum, as she has been very stressed lately. The psychiatrist proceeds to gaslight her into thinking she's crazy, her husband believes the psychiatrist over her, she realizes she's not getting out anytime soon. Also autobiographical, because Skram's life was terrible.)
Hellemyrsfolket (Follows an impoverished family in Bergen. Asks the question of whether poor life choices are the fault of society or the individual. For instance, first novel, the patriarch has stayed sober and hard-working against all odds, he'll keep this family afloat or so help him god. The novel proceeds to break his spirit.)
Skram's translated works might be hard to get your hands on because to my knowledge she's not well known outside of Norway.
Philip K. Dick
Hard sci-fi author. Insanely talented man, the kind of mind I aspire to have.
A Scanner Darkly (an undercover policeman develops a drug problem and an identity crisis)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Features the age-old question of where real ends and synthetic begins)
Victor Hugo
VERY loquatious. However, he's so charming when he babbles on and on that you kind of just have to love him for it. I can recommend:
Quatre-vingt-treize (historical novel, set during the French revolution.)
Les misƩrables (about miserable French people.)
Albertine by Christian Krohg
This realist novel about a young, honest woman whose downwards spiral leads her to prostitution sparked a debate about the treatment of prostitutes in Norway and led to changed legislation in their favor.
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Not for the faint of heart, but if you think you can do it then knock yourself out with this insane book.
Candide by Voltaire
A satirical anti-war, anti-everything novel about a very candid man named Candide, who travels the world and finds that it's a ridiculously, over-the-top awful place. He remains optimistic through it all.
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Delightfully eerie story about a girl who discovers a sinister world almost identical to our own.
Dune by Frank Herbert
Excellent, and while I haven't seen the Villeneuve film yet every interview I've read has given me the strong suspicion that the spirit of the book was lost on him. Read the book.
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Not a perfect novel, but god it's utterly enjoyable. Impossible not to have a good time reading this.
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
One of the few YA fantasy series I've read that I wholly and unabashedly loved. Inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost, featuring very interesting religious themes.
Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
SO MUCH FUN. No point in summarizing in part because I can't, this is just a fun, fun, quintology in three parts. If you like my sense of humor you'll love Hitch Hiker's Guide. It's a longer read, though.
Jerusalem by Selma Lagerlƶf
Penned by the first ever woman who won a Nobel prize in literature, this generational novel depicts the inhabitants of a Swedish village who form a Christian cult and decide to emigrate to Jerusalem. Inspired by a real events. Features seriously interesting characters, my favorite being the couple where the wife developed really bad post-parture depression and wound up committing infanticide, then when she gets out of prison the husband is waiting for her. "I still love you, babe. Let's have new kids."
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Beautiful prose, excellent use of an unreliable narrator, horrifying story. Strong recommend.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Most people have heard of this one already, so I'll just say that it's a deeply funny book. Dorian Gray is awful, just awful, but delightfully so. Shoutout to poor Sybil Vane.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Told from the point of view of a little girl, her sweet childhood takes a dark turn when a white woman is raped and a black man gets the blame.
Euripides. He's the mastermind behind Medea and Bacchae, both of which I strongly recommend.
Henrik Ibsen. A master of writing about the ugliness just beneath the surface. Enemy of the People (Spielberg's movie Jaws is loosely based on it!), Vildanden, and Peer Gynt.
Ludvig Holberg. Erasmus Montanus: Rasmus Berg (Berg meaning "Hill" in Norwegian. VERY normal name.) returns from university, and he is Learnedā¢ now so you may now refer to him only as Erasmus Montanus. He proceeds to be too intellectual to function throughout the play.
Shakespeare. Yeah yeah I feel like a tool, but... he's good damnit. Though my recommendation for him would be to watch a filmatization, as the language can be rather dense. In my experience it's better to know what happens in the play from watching it performed first, before you can really get much out of reading it. The Hollow Crown is a good filmatization of his king trilogies, The Merchant of Venice with Jeremy Irons is amazing, and Baz Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet remains the best Romeo and Juliet film I've seen. Also, sidenote - if English isn't your first language, DON'T make the same mistake I did of reading a translation, thinking that'll be easier.
Sophocles. Wrote the Oedipus Rex trilogy.
Other recs that come to mind are the Old Testament (there's nothing so fascinating as reading stories that date back three thousand years that have shaped our history) and The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg (a scholarly work outlining how an Italian miller named Menochhio formed his own cosmology).
Tagging @theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin in case she wants to add to this.
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