this is the Glass Shards Essential Reading List.
these are my favorite books and i think you should read them too.
2025 · by Hiron Ennes
a beautifully fleshed-out fantasy world of a city atop a gigantic stump, driven by morbid art movements, psychology-bending alchemy, and rot in all its forms. great commentary on politics and art, and a twist that unfurls wonderfully. iridescent prose, dense at first but eventually you just sink into it. some of the best worldbuilding i've had the pleasure of witnessing. oh, yes, and lots of creepy crawlies!
2025 · by qntm
a web serial thoroughly rewritten for traditional publication, this book takes the notion of concept-based cryptids and runs with it until your mind falls out. beings that erase lives from living memory, beings that write themselves into reality, and maybe, just maybe, a looming apocalypse. qntm's clipped present-tense prose is like a blockbuster crawling across your head.
2025 · by Milo Todd
a heartrending dive into transgender life in germany pre– and post–world war II. americans, germans, everyone's complicity is questioned here. the setting is grim, but the book never loses sight of the beauty of the day-to-day. unfortunately glosses over some of magnus hirschfeld's nastier ideas, but still worth a read.
2024–26 · by Plum Pudding · free online
urban decay æsthetic as social commentary on one hand, as incredible character work on the other. an american town outside time that collects lost things. it's all slightly abstracted, looping, mutating – a masterwork in prose that somehow manages to be both vaguely surrealist, and alarmingly grounding.
2019 · by Samantha Allen
shock and awe, glass is reccing a nonfiction book! a trans lady travels around several mid-size cities in red-dominated u.s. states, with the express goal of doing "something gay every day." if you've ever laughed at a "just get the red states to secede" meme, you probably need this book – it puts queerness into perspective. the smallest of sentences in this one flipped my feelings about queer community upside down.
2013 · by Simon Bucher-Jones & Jonathan Dennis
it's cosmic moby dick. a ship the size of a galaxy, sailing between universes – and a botched timeline replacement job means the womanizing captain has his very own ahab, coming after him from the other end of the ship's history. cults, pale imitations of such, and several layers of mutiny later, everything goes to shit. read this and you're in for a good, if very confusing, time.
1998 · by Olga Tokarczuk
a book that treats reality with a gentle touch, swimming through moments and lives in a tiny silesian village: transgender monks, lonely werewolves, and mushroom foraging. there's not really a plot so much as a collection of vibes that add up to something special and meaningful. when I read Tokarczuk, the whole world feels newer and realer. i can't recommend her work enough.
1972 · by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
the aliens come and go, leaving no answers, and life goes on, for them and us. the world is upended in a night, but humanity persists, sifting through its own rubble. this one's real existential. it starts out with spectacular worldbuilding and then leans into its own bleakness until you can't feel your body anymore and the only thing you know is that humanity and its resilience are defined by faith in a miracle, past or future. this one will never stop being timely.