>>24475802>I'll take your post as a rec and check SoS out.SoS is a monumental work of non-fiction given every single war memoir has essentially been a riff on it ever since it was published. It almost singlehandedly changed the way people saw and understood war in fiction and non-fiction alike, and if you're a history buff the book is a treasure trove of first-hand WWI accounts from a man who served in combat for the duration of the entire war on the Western Front.
If you want something a little different, I'd highly recommend On The Marble Cliffs (a brilliant, bizarre, almost Ghibliesque book published in 1939 about the rise of dual dictatorships in a deceptively tranquil forested seaside community in a setting beyond place and time, told from the PoV of a botanist and his family; many literary critics believe the book predicted the World Wars, the rise of Hitler and Stalin, the death of pre-WWI European culture, and the tragic destruction of the environment caused by industrial warfare and the ensuing commercialism), Aladdin's Problem (a 1983 novella about the globe-trotting misadventures of an East German army defector that reads like a European cross between A Confederacy Of Dunces and On The Road), or Eumeswil (an abstract, post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel about a historian in Morocco who ponders his existence while serving in the royal court of a local warlord).
The man was an incredible talent (and frankly, incredible man given the life he lived) who I'm very happy has a growing following here in the States given his popularity and influence was always confined to mainland Europe in his lengthy lifetime.
