Edit: thank you for sharing your suggestions, everyone. I’ll try to check out the ones I haven’t read. Hopefully the responses in this thread were helpful for you too. <3

  • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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    8 hours ago

    Oh, no, the only ones I haven’t read yet are ghostwritten and number9dream.

    And I agree with the order notes. My very out-of-order sequence was Cloud Atlas (the movie introduced me to the book), then Slade House, Black Swan Green, Bone Clocks, Thousand Autumns, Utopia Avenue.

    And I agree that reading the bone clocks before thousand autumns didn’t actually make Marinus and the Anchorites make less sense without Enomoto and Dejima for context.

    However, if I had read Utopia Avenue without any of the others (except Slade House and Black Swan Green), I think I would have had no idea what was going on. As it stands, the main reason I want to read ghostwritten is because I feel like I’m missing out on the context of “the Mongolian” from Utopia Avenue. I think that, in the same way that Cloud Atlas acted as a bridge into his world, Utopia Avenue was almost a culmination of his works thus far. I think that, without them, Jasper de Zoet’s character and, for that matter, the whole story, would have been nigh-incomprehensible to me.