The best books that make you question everything

David Hollander Author Of Anthropica
By David Hollander

Who am I?

As a kid, I was amazed to learn that roads ran from one end of the country to the other and that electrical and telecommunications cables circled the entire planet. Excess frightened me. The planet could be circled in a matter of hours in a swift-flying jet; how could it also contain so much stuff? I felt like I was missing something. The books on this list speak to all of us who have wondered about what we might be missing… and what we are unable to know. I hope they mean as much to you as they have to me!

I wrote...

Anthropica

By David Hollander,

Book cover of Anthropica

What is my book about?

Hungarian fatalist Laszlow Katasztrófa thinks that the human race is a stain on God’s otherwise perfect universe. Can Exit Strategy – Laszlow’s team of misfits, mole people, crackpot scientists, failed artists, psionic paralytics, and at least one Ultimate Frisbee player – unleash the robots that can unleash Armageddon?

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The books I picked & why

The Three-Body Problem

By Cixin Liu, Ken Liu (translator),

Book cover of The Three-Body Problem

Why did I love this book?

The Three-Body Problem is on the one hand a science fiction novel, one that imagines a distant race that would (literally) kill to have a home world as stable as our little earth. But it's also a historical novel (it begins during China's Cultural Revolution), and an anthropological exploration. It seems to study the human race from a vast distance, and to severely judge our myopia and hubris. This is something I’ve always been interested in as a writer… getting above it all and trying to recontextualize our species within the vastness of the cosmos. 

The Three-Body Problem

By Cixin Liu, Ken Liu (translator),

Why should I read it?

8 authors picked The Three-Body Problem as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon - soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones.

1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind.

Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable…

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Infinite Jest

By David Foster Wallace,

Book cover of Infinite Jest

Why did I love this book?

Infinite Jest changed everything for me. Its fragmentation, and the way it sets a dozen plots and subplots in orbit around a single “quest object” (a mysterious video that is purportedly so entertaining that to watch it is to be rendered catatonic and die), makes the reader an active participant in assembling the book’s meaning. This is the way I love to read, and I’m trying to create a similar effect in my own writing. I also think that Wallace was one of the greatest sentence writers to ever hold a pen, and the blistering syntax of Infinite Jest gives readers something to smile about on every page.

Infinite Jest

By David Foster Wallace,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked Infinite Jest as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'A writer of virtuostic talents who can seemingly do anything' New York Times

'Wallace is a superb comedian of culture . . . his exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight' James Wood, Guardian

'He induces the kind of laughter which, when read in bed with a sleeping partner, wakes said sleeping partner up . . . He's damn good' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

'One of the best books about addiction and recovery to appear in recent memory' Sunday Times

Somewhere in the not-so-distant future the residents of Ennet House, a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts, and students at the…

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House of Leaves

By Mark Z. Danielewski,

Book cover of House of Leaves

Why did I love this book?

House of Leaves is a book about a man who has discovered that the inside of his house is bigger than the outside of his house. It turns out that there’s a labyrinthine darkness expanding—perhaps infinitely—within his home. This premise is certainly creepy, but it’s the book’s structure that makes it the most existentially terrifying thing I’ve ever read. Some pages have one word on them; others are printed backward; others seem to orbit a blacked-out center. Usually, we control a book when we are reading, but this book controls us; as a result, we are just as lost in the labyrinth as Navidson, the book’s arguable protagonist. An amazing effect!

House of Leaves

By Mark Z. Danielewski,

Why should I read it?

17 authors picked House of Leaves as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times

Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations,…

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Cloud Atlas

By David Mitchell,

Book cover of Cloud Atlas

Why did I love this book?

Cloud Atlas invites so many different kinds of readers into its tent. It’s a historical fiction (or, really, several historical fictions); it’s a social novel; it’s a science-fiction novel; and, most importantly to many readers, it’s a trick-box novel with a structure that Mitchell seems to be inventing from scratch. The book’s six nested stories—each of which is interrupted at a pivotal moment—travel across centuries, but there’s a sense that something singular moves through each text. The way the book can satisfy at the level of plot while maintaining a sense that the world you see is not all that there is, inspires me to aim bigger in my work.

Cloud Atlas

By David Mitchell,

Why should I read it?

9 authors picked Cloud Atlas as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Six lives. One amazing adventure. The audio publication of one of the most highly acclaimed novels of 2004. 'Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies...' A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified 'dinery server' on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation - the narrators of CLOUD ATLAS hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great…

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Found Audio

By N.J. Campbell,

Book cover of Found Audio

Why did I love this book?

Most of Found Audio takes the form of a transcribed interview with an “adventure journalist,” whose story—even without the book’s surrounding architecture—is riveting. He seems to have discovered something mind-bending about the nature of dreams. But this interview is being delivered to the reader by a writer named N.J. Campbell, who received it (on cassette tape) from an audio engineer, who in turn received the tapes from a shady stranger, who refused to say much about them. The book’s overlapping narratives and absence of any “central authority” create a mobius strip. I love fictions that follow the advice of the sculptor Robert Smithson: “Establish enigmas, not explanations.” And Found Audio may be Exhibit A. 

Found Audio

By N.J. Campbell,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Found Audio as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

* A Best Book of 2017 —Writer's Bone
"[A] mysterious work of metafiction... dizzying, arresting and defiantly bold." —Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune
Amrapali Anna Singh is an historian and analyst capable of discerning the most cryptic and trivial details from audio recordings. One day, a mysterious man appears at her office in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, having traveled a great distance to bring her three Type IV audio cassettes that bear the stamp of a library in Buenos Aires that may or may not exist.

On the cassettes is the deposition of an adventure journalist and his obsessive pursuit of an…

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