Lev Grossman picks Ringworld by Larry Niven
It's Louis Wu's 200th birthday, and he's bored. It's the far future; Earth is a techno-Utopia, but life just isn't that exciting. Enter the Puppeteers, aliens who kidnap Louis and dispatch him to explore a ring-shaped world of unknown origin. Published in 1970, Ringworld is still fresh and rich and wildly entertaining — Niven is a galaxy-class storyteller — and its rigorous scientific foundations make SF-lite like Transformers 2 look like yesterday's news.