Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?

- Underworld, Don Delilo

- A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James

- NW, Zadie Smith

- The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

Multiple narrators, sweeping plot, not always easy to follow, not too postmodern.

+1 1984 especially around modern political times and doublespeak

So hitchhikers guide I can certainly agree with, but the rest of the series is pretty inconsistent. Restaurant was pretty terrible in my opinion, but then Life is almost as good as the original. I'd say the quality of the series is downhill from there. The follow up books didn't introduce many interesting situations or ideas that weren't already presented and so it just felt like it was dragging on.

Legend by David Gemmell. If you live your life by the morale code embodied in this (and other) Gemmell books you won't go far wrong in life.

Depends on how old you are, or for me it did. Some books resonate at different points in a person's life. The fiction that's had the most impact on me as an adult was all stuff I read in my early 30s.

* Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller — Perfect for a single man in his 30s. Very solipsistic and hedonistic, which is a great way to explore that decade. Each of the books in the series is a novel length prose poem. Absolutely beautiful

* Journey to the End of The Night by Louis Ferdinand Celine — my favorite book in the world. Very misanthropic, set in WWI. The protagonist finds himself drafted into the war and does his best to survive while the brave people around him die like idiots, it escalates from there. The most beautiful line I've ever read is from a part of the book where the protagonist is hanging out at a brothel: "Toward one of the beautiful girls there I soon developed an uncommon feeling of trust, which in frightened people takes the place of love." there are jaw-droppers like that on every other page

* Crime and Punishment — a cautionary tale about exactly the kind of solipsism and misanthropy that can take us over in our 30s. Fast paced and beautifully written, it reads like a modern crime thriller.

For fun conceptual stuff

* Ficciones by Borges — short stories that will twist your mind up, each are more puzzle than narrative, but tremendously engaging nonetheless. Ted Chiang is the modern writer that I would identify as the most similar in spirit to Borges.

As a note—I'm a speculative fiction author. Most of what I read these days is sff and nerdy lit fic. The value in fiction is the same as the value in philosophy, it exposes you to the inside of peoples' minds in a way that other forms of narrative entertainment do not, and the real good stuff acts as fuel for concept creation.