axillarypuma said:
Anything steampunk-ish, like bioshock infinite, I don't know if bioshock 1 and 2 counts as steampunk too.
Bioshock 1 and
2 are arguably more steampunk than
Infinite was.
OT: My first recommendation for fantasy will be none other than George R. R. Martin's
A Song of Ice & Fire series, starting with
A Game of Thrones.
The books are quite long (
A Storm of Swords alone is basically the same length as the entire
Lord of the Rings trilogy combined) but it's not nearly so verbose a piece of literature as something like the work of Tolkien. The stories are absolutely excellent if you want a gritty, violent, brutal depiction of horrible people doing awful things in an ugly world, though.
Otherwise, I would recommend
The Lord of the Rings anyway. If you want to ease in a little easier, start with
The Hobbit, as it's a much smoother read comparatively speaking but still gives you a taste of Tolkien's style, which admittedly is not for everyone.
For other long reads, there's Patrick Rothfuss'
The Name of the Wind and
The Wise Man's Fear, Brandon Sanderson's
Mistborn books (starting with
The Final Empire), or Scott Lynch's
The Gentleman Bastards books (starting with
The Lies of Locke Lamora). Or Terry Brooks'
Shannara series, which was originally criticized for cribbing its style from
The Lord of the Rings but has been going on for a long while since then and has expanded quite significantly.
And if you're interested in Arthurian legend at all,
The Once and Future King by T. H. White must be mentioned as well.
For shorter reads with more comedic tones, there's Terry Pratchett's
Discworld series (though be forewarned, there are a
lot of books there and they don't all necessarily follow on exactly from the previous one written) or Terry Brooks'
Magic Kingdom of Landover series (which is admittedly a pretty simple read, especially compared to everything else I've named, but I still enjoy them).
As for Sci-Fi, I'm going to echo names listed by many other people around here. If you want a good comedy, you can't go wrong with Douglas Adams'
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as well as
The Restaurant at the end of the Universe;
Life, the Universe, and Everything; and
So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish.
For hard sci-fi, you can't really do better than Isaac Asimov, who (as named above) wrote
I, Robot and
The Foundation series. He's got many others as well, but those are possibly his best-known titles, and good starting points. To accompany Asimov, there's also his compatriots Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, though I've not read the latter myself yet. Heinlein wrote
Starship Troopers (long before the film) as well as
Stranger in a Strange Land, which is where the term "grok" came from if you've ever chanced to hear it.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, also mentioned above, is the novel that the film
Blade Runner was based on, if you've ever seen it, so I think that should be reason enough alone to read it. Other seminal near-future cyberpunk (cyberpunk is a lot like a futuristic version of steampunk, just to clarify) sci-fi books include many of the stories written by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Pat Cadigan. Gibson is probably the easiest starting point of those, with
Neuromancer (one of the main contributions to the popularization of the setting) and its follow-ups
Count Zero and
Mona Lisa Overdrive. There's also a book set in the
Deus Ex: Human Revolution universe called
The Icarus Effect, written by one of the people who worked on the game, if you're interested in that.
And for something a little more fantastic (by which I mean not so grounded in reality), there's the
Culture series by Iain M. Banks, which starts with the book
Consider Phlebas and goes on for a good few more books after that. They're more space opera than anything else.
Speaking of space operas, if you're interested in
Star Wars at all,
there are tons of those check out the
Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn,
Heir to the Empire,
Dark Force Rising, and
The Last Command. They were recently classified as officially not being "canon", but I wouldn't let that detract from the enjoyment, they're quality books set some time after
The Return of the Jedi.
