Books that are worth reading. Different genres and styles.  Part 1

The Hyperion series. Dan Simmons

The Hyperion Cantos is a series of science fiction novels by Dan Simmons. The title was originally used for the collection of the first pair of books in the series, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion and later came to refer to the overall storyline, including Endymion, The Rise of Endymion.

Hyperion

First published in 1989, Hyperion has the structure of a frame story, similar to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. The story weaves the interlocking tales of a diverse group of travelers sent on a pilgrimage to the Time Tombs on Hyperion. The travelers have been sent by the Church of the Final Atonement, alternately known as the Shrike Church, and the Hegemony (the government of the human star systems) to make a request of the Shrike. As they progress in their journey, each of the pilgrims tells their tale.

The rest of annotations of this series - can contain spoilers, so they are not included.

Love of Life. Jack Londnon

A novel about lust for life, betrayal and love.
This is my absolute favourite novel.

The Sea-Wolf by Jack London

The Sea-Wolf is a 1904 psychological adventure novel by American novelist Jack London. The book's protagonist, Humphrey van Weyden, is a literary critic who is a survivor of an ocean collision and who comes under the dominance of Wolf Larsen, the powerful and amoral sea captain who rescues him.

The Sea Wolf tells the story of a soft, domesticated protagonist, in this novel's case an intellectual man named Humphrey van Weyden, forced to become tough and self-reliant by exposure to cruelty and brutality.

The Family  (Mario Puzo)

The Family is a 2001 novel written by Mario Puzo. The novel is about Pope Alexander VI and his family. Puzo spent over twenty years working on the book off and on, while he wrote others. The novel was finished by his longtime girlfriend, Carol Gino. The Family is effectively his last novel.

Pope Alexander VI (formerly Rodrigo Borgia) believes God will ultimately forgive his many sins simply because, as Pope, he is infallible and divine. The Family focuses on this cunning, ambitious despot and his children—the ruthless Cesare and the beautiful but wicked Lucrezia.

A passionate love story runs through the novel, but it is a sinful one. Lucrezia lost her virginity to her brother Cesare when she was only thirteen, and the two have loved only each other ever since.

The Godfather

The Godfather is a famous crime novel written by Italian American author Mario Puzo, originally published in 1969 by G. P. Putnam's Sons. It details the story of a fictional Mafia family based in New York City (and Long Beach, New York), headed by Don Vito Corleone, who became synonymous with the Italian Mafia. The novel covers the years 1945 to 1955, and also provides the back story of Vito Corleone from early childhood to adulthood.

Foundation series by Isaac Asimov

The Foundation series is a science fiction series of books by Isaac Asimov. For nearly thirty years, the series was a trilogy: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation. It won the one-time Hugo Award for "Best All-Time Series" in 1966. Asimov began adding to the series in 1981, with two sequels: Foundation's Edge, Foundation and Earth, and two prequels: Prelude to Foundation, Forward the Foundation.

The premise of the series is that the mathematician Hari Seldon spent his life developing a branch of mathematics known as psychohistory, a concept of mathematical sociology. Using the laws of mass action, it can predict the future, but only on a large scale. Seldon foresees the imminent fall of the Galactic Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a dark age lasting 30,000 years before a second great empire arises. Seldon also foresees an alternative where the interregnum will last only one thousand years. To ensure the more favorable outcome, Seldon creates a foundation of talented artisans and engineers at the extreme end of the galaxy, to preserve and expand on humanity's collective knowledge, and thus become the foundation for a new galactic empire.

Witcher series by  Andrzej Sapkowski

Witcher is a fantasy series of short stories and novels about the witcher Geralt of Rivia. In Sapkowski's books, "Witchers" are monster hunters who (with training and body modification) develop supernatural abilities at a young age to battle deadly monsters.

The saga focuses on Geralt of Rivia and Ciri, a child of destiny. Ciri, princess of a recently conquered country and a pawn of international politics, becomes a witcher-in-training. Geralt is drawn into a whirlwind of events in his attempts to protect her.

Stephen King - Dark Tower series

The Dark Tower is a series of books written by American author Stephen King that incorporates themes from multiple genres, including dark fantasy, science fantasy, horror, and Western. It describes a "gunslinger" and his quest toward a tower, the nature of which is both physical and metaphorical. The series, and its use of the Dark Tower, expands upon Stephen King's multiverse and in doing so, links together many of his other novels. King has described the series as his magnum opus. In addition to the eight novels of the series proper that comprise 4,250 pages, many of King's other books relate to the story, introducing concepts and characters that come into play as the series progresses.

Irvine Welsh  Trainspotting

Trainspotting is the first novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, first published in 1993. It takes the form of a collection of short stories, written in either Scots, Scottish English or British English, revolving around various residents of Leith, Edinburgh who either use heroin, are friends of the core group of heroin users, or engage in destructive activities that are implicitly portrayed as addictions that serve the same function as heroin addiction. The novel is set in the late 1980s.
There is a sequel called 'Porno'.

Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larsson

Millennium is a series of best-selling and award-winning Swedish crime novels, created by Stieg Larsson. The two primary characters in the saga are Lisbeth Salander, a woman in her twenties with a photographic memory and poor social skills, and Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and publisher of a magazine called Millennium.

Larsson planned the series as having ten installments, but due to his sudden death in 2004, only three were completed and published. All of them were published posthumously: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2005, The Girl Who Played with Fire in 2006, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest in 2007.

After his death, many of Larsson's friends said the character of Lisbeth Salander was created out of an incident in which Larsson, then a teenager, witnessed three of his friends gang-raping an acquaintance of his named Lisbeth, and did nothing to stop it. Days later, wracked with guilt, he begged her forgiveness — which she refused. The incident, he said, haunted him for years afterward, and in part moved him to create a character with her name who was also a rape survivor.

Twenty Thousand Leauges Under The Sea by Jules Verne

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World) is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne published in 1870.
During the year 1866, ships of several nations spot a mysterious sea monster, which some suggest to be a giant narwhal. The United States government assembles an expedition in New York City to find and destroy the monster. Professor Pierre Aronnax, a French marine biologist and narrator of the story, who happens to be in New York at the time, receives a last-minute invitation to join the expedition which he accepts. Canadian whaler and master harpoonist Ned Land and Aronnax's faithful servant Conseil are also brought aboard.

The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne

The Mysterious Island is a novel by Jules Verne, published in 1874.
The plot focuses on the adventures of five Americans on an uncharted island in the South Pacific. During the American Civil War, five northern prisoners of war decide to escape, during the siege of Richmond, Virginia, by hijacking a balloon.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Fight Club is a 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. It follows the experiences of an unnamed protagonist struggling with insomnia. Inspired by his doctor's exasperated remark that insomnia is not suffering, the protagonist finds relief by impersonating a seriously ill person in several support groups. Then he meets a mysterious man named Tyler Durden and establishes an underground fighting club as radical psychotherapy.
Fight Club centers on an anonymous narrator, who works as a product recall specialist for an unnamed car company. Because of the stress of his job and the jet lag brought upon by frequent business trips, he begins to suffer from recurring insomnia. When he seeks treatment, his doctor advises him to visit a support group for testicular cancer victims to "see what real suffering is like". He finds that sharing the problems of others—despite not having testicular cancer himself—alleviates his insomnia.

Fight club 2 is coming soon. Hype!

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

Lullaby is a horror-satire novel by American author Chuck Palahniuk, published in 2002.
Lullaby is the story of Carl Streator, a newspaper reporter who has been assigned to write articles on a series of cases of sudden infant death syndrome, from which his own child had died. Streator discovers that his wife and child had died immediately after he read them a "culling song", or African chant, from a book entitled Poems and Rhymes Around the World. As Streator learns, the culling song has the power to kill anyone it is spoken to. Because of the stress of his life, it became unusually powerful, allowing him to kill by only thinking the poem. During his investigations into other SIDS cases for his article, he finds that a copy of the book was at the scene of each death. In every case, the book was open to a page that contained the "culling song".

Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

Choke is a 2001 novel by American author Chuck Palahniuk. The story focuses on Victor Mancini, a sex addict who must find work in order to afford the care that his mother is receiving in her nursing home. Victor first resorts to being a con man, then after receiving money from various "good Samaritans", gets a job at a colonial reenactment museum before building a dream home for himself.

Choke follows Victor Mancini and his friend Denny through a few months of their lives with frequent flashbacks to the days when Victor was a child. He had grown up moving from one foster home to another, as his mother was found to be unfit to raise him. Several times throughout his childhood, his mother would kidnap him from his various foster parents, though every time they would eventually be caught, and he would again be remanded over to the governmental child welfare agency.

Diary by Chuck Palahniuk

Diary is a 2003 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. The book is written like a diary. Its protagonist is Misty Wilmot, a once-promising young artist currently working as a waitress in a hotel. Her husband, a contractor, is in a coma after a suicide attempt. According to the description on the back of Diary, Misty "soon finds herself a pawn in a larger conspiracy that threatens to cost hundreds of lives."

Diary loosely falls into the modern horror genre, putting aside violence and shock tactics in favour of psychological scares and dark humor.

Diary takes the form of a "coma diary" telling the story of Misty Marie Wilmot as her husband lies senseless in a hospital after a suicide attempt. The story is not exactly told by Misty but through a second-person perspective instead. Once she was an art student dreaming of creativity and freedom, but now, after marrying her husband Peter while they were both still at school and then giving birth to their daughter shortly after, she is eventually brought back to Waytansea Island, a place that was once-quaint but is now tourist-overrun. Misty has been reduced to the lowly condition of a mere waitress within a common resort hotel. Peter, before falling into his coma, was building hidden rooms within the houses he was remodeling and scrawling vile messages all over the walls.

The S by Chuck Palahniuk

In the book, every member of the Creedish Cult learns how to be a servant for the human race—most of them are butlers and maids—and fear most human pleasures. They await a sign from God to tell them to deliver themselves unto Him; that is, they must commit suicide.

The sign finally comes, and a good ten years later, Tender becomes the last surviving member of the cult. He is thrown into mainstream culture and becomes a personal icon for many people.

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk

Each of the book's chapters contains three sections: a story chapter, which acts as a framing device for the otherwise unconnected short stories; a poem about a particular writer on the tour, its author being unspecified; and the short story written by that writer.

The main story centers on a group of seventeen individuals (all of whom go by nicknames based on the story they tell) who have decided to participate in a secret writers' retreat, frequently compared by characters to the Villa Diodati retreat of 1816. After having noticed an invitation to the retreat posted on the bulletin board of a cafe in Oregon, the characters follow instructions on the invitation to meet Mr. Whittier, the retreat's organizer. Whittier tells them to each wait for a bus to pick them up the next morning and bring only what they can fit into one piece of luggage (in particular, only what they feel they need most).

And Forgotten realms series of my childhood. B

Forgotten Realms is a Dungeons and Dragons setting that focuses primarily on Faerûn, an ancient land of magic and monsters, of peril and wonder.

An arcane cataclysm and the merging of two worlds have ravaged the world, realigned its planes, and left nations in ruins. Wizened emperors and upstart kings scheme and fight to secure a place in the world. Horrifying creatures lurk in and around civilized places. Lost treasures lie in darkness, awaiting rediscovery.

This series is about dark elf Dark elf Drizzt Do'Urden and his long journey (~30 books).