"Crime & punishment" by F.Dostoyevsky - the only "long" school reading I've finished in my entire pupil-cadency. Never regreted it and it's probably #1 on the "read-again" list.
P.K. Dick(again) - I've read the following:
Ubik,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Don't like the way he writes but really enjoy his ideas. Currently I'm reading "the man in the high castle", mentioned here a few post earlier. My first Dick novel (ekhm
) in english.
"Roadside picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Very graphic, you may also want to see the movie "stalker" which is very losely based on the book (Strugatsky bros. also helped with the screenplay). While the movie can get a bit boring, it has very good pictures/camera work and filming locations.
Stanislaw Lem - most popular polish s-f writer.
The Cyberiad - a collection of short stories. I'll read them to my children as soon as I'll have some
But it's also a good read for adults.
Tales of Pirx the Pilot - short stories about Pilot Pirx, all of them good, some are even extraordinary. One could say this is a teeny adventure book, but the technical jargon used, makes it a lot more. "Terminus", "the inquest" and "ananke" are probably one of the best stories i've ever read.
Golem XIV - this one is about a super computer which was developed by the military but eventually the project got suspended and one of the computers is given away for academic studies. It depicts the dialogues/monologues that Golem has with the scientists. Very good begining, you dont know where the facts end and fiction begins. But it's a hard read, unfortunately I haven't finished it.
"Memoirs Found in a Bathtub" - Post apocalyptic world. The main character is living in one of the underground "new pentagons" and gets enlisted as an agent with a secret mission. There's only one problem... no one in the pentagon knows what the secret mission is. A very paranoic dystopia.
I
DO NOT recommend reading the novel
"Haunted" by Chuck Palahniuk. At least not all of it. While some of the short stories in the book are very good, the parts stiching them togheter are rather dull imho. I struggled to finish it.
Here's one of the best stories from this book.