Recs if you like Stoner...

literary (or literary-leaning) fiction focused specifically on isolation, disconnection, loneliness — and what they teach us about life and humanity.

ft. recs from the community!

Book titles that represent reasons you might go to the doctor, what you might say to each other, or what treatments might be offered to cure your ailments. It's up to you to decide what is what😉

(This is not a commentary on these books or authors! The focus of this list is purely on the titles---but if you find a favorite new read here, I'd love to know🤭)

you can enter a space. you are a regular guy, you can enter a room. you are a regular guy, you can do that transaction. you are a regular guy, you know how to answer the phone. you are a regular guy, you know what sleep is. you are a regular guy, you know what it means to be you.

all of these books have regular people as the protagonist doing all sorts of things, from kissing to killing!

as always, open to all suggestions!

"What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight." — Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

Fiction that embodies the experience of being Midwestern and full of big feelings: depression, yearning, being lost in a cornfield

fiction where a composed, detached voice conceals its own turmoil, or circles a truth it cannot name, drawing the reader’s hungry gaze toward the silences, each one heavy with unspoken meaning.

it’s all in what is not said.

recs welcome as always :)

puts beret on a jaunty angle ‘why yes i went to Oxbridge and go skiing on my holibobs with papa, why do you ask?’ takes a hit of tobacco flavoured vape, puts asterisk in margin of the obscure classic i’m ‘reading’

the list for people who want to look ‘well read’ and need some books to name drop - look no further

if you have read them, more power to you, but this is explicitly about the people who claim to have read them but can’t read instructions on pasta

For when you need to wallow in melancholy and misery: a collection of pessimistic, cynical, downbeat, depressing, doom and gloom fiction for my disillusioned friends.

More to come!

Got the holiday blues? Check out my list Christmas with the Cranks!

the texture of sun-warm sheets, time alone with a book, the lattice of light through the trees in the early evening, the comfort of an ordinary routine, a fleeting exchange, an everyday kindness.

these works of fiction observe, preserve and venerate the beautiful mundane, the small things of life.

recs very much welcome :)

books about lost chances, 'what ifs', and the lives that might've been. nostalgia and regret are two sides of the same coin: a lingering, a dwelling, on a past you can't return to.

books that shayne topp from smosh has read in 2025 (ones that he talked about or posted on social media at the end of the year)

book recs for blue readers according to read your color on substack | updated periodically

for when you’re craving an emotional hangover.

Read and reviewed. Shared on his ig stories/ socials.

Fiction books with Canadian places in the title.

(Sometimes the book is completely irrelevant to the actual Canadian place, but I'm having fun ok)

Books that Hudson has mentioned in interviews to try to understand his brain a little bit more 😹

(starting list taken from @hudsonwfiles on Instagram)

the books shayne topp (from icarly) recommended from his 2025 reads on his instagram story!

All the Classics I want to read before ...ya know.

Mind you not just about academics or authors with a random abandoned PhD—more like the unbelievable people who manage to write bestsellers on a hundred notes stuck to their research paper drafts. Or at least worked long enough in the field to create believable fictional academics and niche academia jokes.

Unbound by fiction subgenres or personal ratings—feel free to propose more books in the comments!