VALIS

Moby Dick, Herman Melville VALIS, Philip K Dick Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance + also Lila, Robert Pirsig Naked Lunch, William Burroughs Immortality, Milan Kundera Catch-22, Joseph Heller (pair with The Deserters, Charles Glass -- In fact a lot of the stuff in Catch-22 is actually toned down from reality) Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha, Daniel Ingram (but ignore 80% of it)

"A Canticle For Leibowitz" "The Sparrow" "Lord of Light" "The Immortal" "Hyperion" "The Last Question" "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" "Stranger in a Strange Land" "The City and the Stars" "Childhood's End" "Anathem" "Eifelheim" "A Case of Conscience" "VALIS" trilogy "The Book of Strange New Things" "Behold The Man" "The God Engines" "Book of the New Sun" "The Parable of the Sower" "The Dosadi Experiment" "Grass" "Project Pope" "Calculating God" "Factoring Humanity" "Jesus on Mars" "Surface Detail

- Sapiens - The Lord of the Rings - Siddhartha - Chaos: Making a New Science - The Death Gate cycle books - Neuromancer - Head First Design Patterns - Valis - Dune - The name of the rose I'm sure there are more, but these are the ones off the top of my head.

I adore Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but for Philip K Dick at his most mind-bending, I’d instead go for Valis

VALIS by Philip K. Dick and Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Sounds good. I'm on book 12 of the "Wheel of Time" series by Jordan now, plus all the non-fiction I'm reading. But maybe after I finish WoT I'll binge on PKD for a while. I did enjoy VALIS quite a lot, even though it was pretty f'in weird. :-)

You're probably right, but as of now, VALIS is the only thing I've read by PKD, so it's the only one I can recommend. I have a big pile of his other works here, waiting to be read, but just haven't gotten to the rest yet. :-(

Neuromancer - William Gibson REAMDE- Neal Stephenson Pattern Recognition / Zero History / Spook Country - William Gibson The Peripheral - William Gibson Not exactly the same thing, but I'll also throw in Glasshouse by Charles Stross. And since we're talking Charles Stross, also add Halting State to the list. Oh, and VALIS by Philip K. Dick. Definitely worth a read.

Doubtless there'll be lots of strong opinions, and (hopefully, usefully) lots of duplicates that you can then tote up to get a bit of a consensus. Iain M. Banks - all his Culture books are fantastic, but I'll single out 'Excession' since you seek titles. Neal Stephenson's 'Anathem' Stephen Donaldson (most famous for the Thomas Covenant tri-trilogy) wrote a 5-book 'Gap Series'. I have very fond memories of it, though it's been two decades since I read it. Philip K. Dick wrote a tonne of good stuff (and a bit of meh) but my two favourite are Clans of the Alphane Moon (the first Dick I read), and Valis (a bit more conventional to have on the favourite list) Ursula Le Guin also has a huge body of excellent work - Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed are my favourites. I really loved Roger Zelazny's Lord Of Light, though I understand it's not conventionally considered his best work.

I really enjoyed Halting State, and Accelerando, and also the MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood as well as Philip K. Dicks works, Valis in particular.