Very cool

Excellent vibe

Pale Fire by Nabokov

Whores for Gloria by William T. Vollmann

House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski

Only Revolutions also by Danielewski (I’ll be honest, I didn’t like this one, but it’s very much in the vein of what you’re talking about)

If one winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace if you want a project

Tristam Shandy by Lawrence Stern if you want a classic

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis

Hell Don Quixote has a ton of metafiction, and it’s arguably the first novel!

Sure!

Ooh these are some good ones, but I’ll leave aside the poetry because I’m much more a prose guy

The first thing that comes to mind is to combine your love of modernism and of outsiders with gigantic emotions and recommend some D.H. Lawrence like Sons and lovers or Women in Love

I’d also recommend They by Kay Dick. This one blew my face off when I read it recently.

Maybe If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino

Maybe Rent Boy by Gary Indiana

Maybe Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Maybe Babel by R.F. Kuang

Idk if any of these have everything you’re looking for, maybe there’s something here you could vibe with

Also I played And Those We Love Alive by Porpentine a while back and loved it btw

My hot tip is to do an ADHD screening test just to rule it out as a possibility because you’re saying exactly what undiagnosed, unmedicated me would have said.

What sort of nonfiction stuff are you talking, if you don’t mind me asking?

I find that with nonfiction like microhistory I can just immerse myself in it because it’s written for a brain like mine.

For theory, I strongly recommend participating in a reading group if there’s one available. You can substitute this for theory podcasts and/or following the discussion on a social media platform from a past reading group and considering the comments that people make along with coming up with responses to those comments (even if you don’t actually post them) because being a part of a discussion brings a richness to the reading and it helps to keep motivation up.

When it comes to legit history, that’s tough. Either I slog through it and do my best, knowing that unless the book is written exceptionally well, I’m just not going to wring everything out of the reading that a scholar would (and that’s fine) or I try to find a good overview of the historical subject to help me familiarise myself with the main figures/movements/events etc. so that I can contextualise the info I get while reading the book - this might be a video essay, a lecture, or a book that is oriented towards beginners to use as a primer.

Things like biographies are hit and miss imo and it really depends on the author’s ability to write and how good they are at research.

Mostly no. My brain does not work like most people’s regarding books, I’ve learned over the years

But one thing you might try is reading out of the house at a park, a coffee shop, or wherever, where there are fewer distractions

Butcher’s Crossing was pretty good, as are basically any of the Mcarthy border trilogy.

I don’t have good recommendations for this. I’ll second McCarthy, but those are also kind of anti-Westerns

What age(s) are we talking here? That’s going to be a big determinant on what sort of books would be suitable.

I think that instilling values that are amenable to communism is probably the best route rather than reading Mao’s Little Red Book to them before tucking them into bed, unless they are in their teen years at which point you’d be able suggest more overtly political stuff for them to engage with.

Ursula Le Guin wrote YA fiction and her work has a plenty of pro-communist messages, so that might be a good author to consider depending on the age of the audience.

Waiting for the unabridged Capital Vol. 1-3 as answer (which would not be a good answer!).

A is for Activist by Innosanto Nagara

Hell yes.

Off the top of my head

The Pale King, David Foster Wallace’s last, unfinished novel.

The Employees by Olga Ravn

The Wasp Factory by Iain M. Banks

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

Crash by J.G. Ballard

I assume you’re asking about literary fiction with an explicit political stance that’s pretty approachable

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guinn

Things Fall Apart by China Achebe

Might add more if I think of any

I can, but in good conscience, I can’t recommend the other ones

Like Rivers of London? Is more cop and less detective though. The other big one is the Dresden Files.

The City and the City by China Mieville

The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher (edit whoops someone already recommended this one)

I try not to feel bad about reading fluffy books by justifying by reading so much theory.

One of the worst things that a person can do to themselves is to beat themselves up over their preference in books.

Adults will watch the absolute lowest tier trash TV shows, they will adore children’s shows, they will watch the same thing over and over again and nobody bats an eye at this. But if you tell people that you’re re-reading the same book for the tenth time, that you’re reading some Harlequin romance novel, or that you’re reading a book aimed at a younger audience and suddenly everyone starts pearl-clutching over it.

(There used to be a huge amount of snobbery towards SciFi in literature although as SciFi has become more mainstream it seems as though a lot of that has fallen away, thankfully.)

But I’m getting off track here. What I’m trying to tell you is that if you have found the sort of reading that you really enjoy then you should embrace this and relish in it because everyone deserves to get wrapped up in a (subjectively) wonderful book. Life is short and it’s not like there’s a surplus of joy in the world so you should give yourself permission to read what you love to read, whatever that happens to be.

This is a bit of a wildcard suggestion but, given what you’ve mentioned in this comment and the fact that you’re here on Hexbear, you might find Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy interesting.

Sea of Poppies

River of Smoke

Flood of Fire

I love Jane Austen. Let’s see

Deathless by Catherine M. Valente

The Habitation of the Blessed by the same

The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir

The Broken Earth Trilogy by J.K. Nemsin

The Years of Rice and Salt

American Gods or Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (male protagonist and writer alert though)

If you want something classic:

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Also I read plenty of fluff. I love fluff

Very Hungry Caterpillar

Goodnight Moon

Books by Sandra Boynton

Books by John Klassen

Books by Mo Willlums

The Pout Pout Fish

The Book With No Pictures

Where the Wild Things Are

Chirri and Chirra books

H.P. Lovecraft is the original weird fiction writer. He even popularized the term. The guy was a racist crank and complete weirdo failson, but he was one of the best to ever do it. YMMV

The stories of Franz Kafka

The stories of Jorge Luis Borges. I’d recommend Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius as a good one to start with

The stories of Thomas Ligotti

But if you want some real weird shit, I’d recommend Cyclonopedia: A Complicity with Anonymous Materials. I’ve never gotten a single other person to read this one lmao

Magic in the Middle Ages - Richard Kieckhefer

It’s fairly short and covers broad strokes with some poignant examples of specifics. Generally the thesis is that people treated magic like any other knowledge or specialization and they practiced it hoping to solve practical problems.

Closest thing I can think of is Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Francis Yates

It’s a scholarly study of Renaissance Hermeticism, and totally blew my mind when I read it. Looking at her bibliography, she has some other books on occult history that might be worth checking out, although I can’t vouch for them personally