Any personal recommendations for a starter or favorites (perhaps top three or five or something like that)?
Warning: spoilers follow that do not diminish the knock out punch this work delivers: It's written in it's own language, a mixture of Russian and UK slang, which one cannot read at first. About 3 chapters in, the language clicks and then a good reader starts the book over from the beginning. It is a popular book due to the film, and the ultra violence depicted within, but it is also ground breaking philosophical literature because the main character is a hardened criminal and is the narrator, he spends the entire novel explaining his philosophy of life, which by the end of the novel you realize is the same philosophy of modern politics, and the UK edition of the novel ends with the entire novel being the story of a senior member of parliament's youth origin story.
The fact that the novel is in a fictional language increases the reader's submersion in the story line, creating one of the most impactful novels I know.
Another great read, much shorter, more like getting into a street brawl: Notes From The Underground by Dostoyevsky. Practically the creator of self critical essays, and often the first read for people interested in Existentialism.
Anything from the "Beat Generation" authors, anything from Philip K Dick, anything from Herman Hesse.
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is another recent literary favorite
Girl, Woman, Other is one of my overall favorites from the last few years. Th character work is phenomenal. Do try to read a hard copy, rather than on an ereader, if you can. The book uses punctuation and the layout of text on a page creatively, and I’m not sure how well that gets preserved in an ebook.
If you want to see the other style of writing in Rushdie, I can suggest Shalimar The Clown or The Ground Beneath Her Feet. But these are nowhere near as grand as Midnights Children.
In either category, a fair amount of interest in history helps to enjoy his books.
He also did the screenplays for most of Bela Tarr’s movies
After reading that, you’ll no longer think that Nobel Prize winners for literature write books that are difficult to read and understand.
That said, people who read less tend to believe that more and bigger words equal better writting. My (usually scientific) texts are described as "telegraphic", and heavily expanded without adding any real content. E.g. "the house was white" gets transformed to "the paint that covered the beautiful house was pure white".
* Animal Farm - George Orwell
* The Fall - Albert Camus
* Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
* One hundred years of solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
* The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Easy to read but provides a profound understanding of the unique historical situation it describes. A famous and heartbreaking sentence: ‘(…) I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.’