Totally agree with you there. I'd add though that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart punched post-colonialism in the face and reinvented the genre almost completely. In my opinion, you can't read one book without reading the other - since they're basically opposing essays in every way.

I'd also add that Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude pretty much defined the entire scope of Magical Realism and South American literature.

On a more personal note, I feel that the Black Company series by Glen Cook set on a bar on realistic, large scale (ok sort of) fantasy warfare (with magic).

Edit @ Relic: Don't forget the Iliad! Although it might more technically fall under the category of a classical epic than the newer definition, it's still wonderful. Remember when Achilles kills a fucking river? Yeah. Awesome.

 

I hated when they told me to read specific books in high school. Even if they were awesome, it simply wasn't what I was in mood to read at the time and made me despise the whole experience.

Though with Heart of Darkness I had other problem. While I liked the idea behind the book, I really couldn't read it for some reason. I remember starting the same page over and over again, but I don't remember if I finished the book or not.

Maybe I should try it again.

 

Definitely re-read it. I know what you mean, and I generally find I enjoy some classics now that I choose to read them. It's really, really short as well, so once you get into the narrators voice, you'll just power through it.

 

For me, the best part of Heart of Darkness has always been the fact that it could have been marketed as a factual account of Conrad's time in the congo and the only changes necessary would have been a find/replace on the names. More or less everything in it actually happened, save for Conrad actually meeting "Kurtz" or Kurtz dying - his real life equivalent went on to die a wealthy man in 1924.

Puts a new spin on his deconstruction of the fabric of society, really.

 

Agree on Orwell, Vonnegut, Huxley, Conrad, and Achebe, though I don't know that Things Fall Apart had the audience to meet what Cheddar's looking for. It is, however, one of my all-time favorite books and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Gilgamesh as well as Beowulf are pretty much the granddaddies of adventure stories, coming to you out of the sands of time.

In the category of books meant to elicit a visceral response from the reader, there's the Uncle Tom's Cabin and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Of course, the latter was the truth. but you get my drift. The Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle are two other examples of books written to expose a dark underbelly in the U.S. and to try to tear off the rose-tinted glasses.

People who devour the likes of Michael Crichton and John Grisham would say they're ground-breaking but only really in the sense that people can still be convinced to shell out good money for books consisting of little more than running a find-replace on the names in a repetitive, formulaic plot.

And lastly, the most ground-breaking fiction I can think of: Dr. Suess.

 

The first novel, in the sense that we know of a "novel" these days, was The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu.