Ask Lemmy

Anything by Terry Pratchett (look for one of the "where to start" guides). Funny, a bit ridiculous, but always super intelligent with lots of good social commentary.

Ursula Le Guin has lots of bangers. Slow burning sci-fi with deep atmosphere and social philosophy. Any of her Hainish books are good for that. Earthsea series is beautiful. The Birthday Of The World is my favourite short stories book.

Neuromancer by William Gibson if you're into cyberpunk.

UNSONG if you're keen on religion-themed absurd fantasy. It's amazing. Good Omens by Pratchett and Gaiman is also great on that front.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Fictional account of the dustbowl migration in the US. It will make you righteously angry, especially when you realise the same shit is still happening in other ways.

Pretty much anything in the "Known Space" series by Larry Niven (et al - there are works by some other authors in that space).

Cradle! Or better, the cradle series. It's a sort of adventure story in a fantasy world.

"The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" is a hell of read, as well as "The Navidson Record".

But "The Necronomicon" is my favorite fictional book, I think.

Raymond Chandler's novels, esp The Lady in the Lake

The Pirx the Pilot stories, 8 in 2 volumes

Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key

2nd the Hitchhiker's Guide and they're easy to rejoin

A A Fair's novels are short and have odd western us lore in them, one has a great way to bet in Vegas, others name spots in Mexico, they were Gardner's fun books that he liked to write more than other series.

The Handmaid's Tale

We

Nightfall

The Terminal Experiment

I second someone else suggestion: the murderbot diaries. It's great.
Most of the books people here are recommending are fairly lengthy, but you can get through the first murderbot book in a dedicated evening.

Any early Alistair MacLean...

Guns of Navaronne

Where Eagles Dare

When Eight Bells Toll

Night Without End

Puppet on a String

Louis Lamour's westerns are complete popcorn and fun to read

C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower books

The Hitchhiker’s Guide, you likely won’t be able to finish each of the 5 books in the trilogy in a day but it’s something you can read a hundred times and find a new witty joke somewhere, much like all the Discworld novels.

The Expanse is another that you could burn through a book a day but wow it’s a hell of a story and worth taking your time on each character’s perspective, Outlander is also a good one for the same reasons but those are 1k pagers

The Lathe of Heaven by LeGuin is pretty short, and great

Finish in a day isn’t a great requirement to put alongside “best ever”, as others have already covered. That aside, check out The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. You’ll be surprised by how fun it is to learn about medieval technology development and stone cathedral building techniques when it’s all wrapped up in a gripping narrative.

I have two fantastic recommendations that are pretty short reads.

Enders Game is fantastic Sci fi and quite cut throat. Great Story. Far better than the marginal movie that came out based on it.

The Martian. Sci fi, but more realistic and the author must have researched the hell out of things to put this book together. The movie they made was actually pretty good, but the book outshines it by leaps and bounds. The internal monolog of the main character is outstanding in the book and it just can't happen through the movie.

I reccomend hopping on [email protected]

The Lady Astronaut series by Mary Robinette Kowal. The first book is called The Calculating Stars. Basically, an alternate history where (spoiler for the opening chapter)

spoiler

a meteor wipes out the east coast and kick-starts climate change, causing the Space Age to start 10 years early.

It follows a Jewish computer (a woman who literally runs calculations for NASA, as seen in Hidden Figures) who wants to become an astronaut, and her struggles with the racism and misogyny of the 1950s.

Recommend high quality short stories. Edgar Allen Poe has a collection that is some of the most thrilling, mysterious and fun, imaginative, adventurous, grotesque and other depending on the story. https://www.amazon.com/Edgar-Allan-Poe-Complete-Collection/dp/1453643141

Robert Louis Stevenson was also a fantastic writer of short stories.https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Short-Stories-Robert-Stevenson/dp/030680882X

I like short stories sometimes as I can't commit to a larger read.