I've been trying to get into X- Men but I am feeling a little lost. The recommended reading list doesn't seem as solid as other pages. I watched the cartoon in the 90s and now I am trying to get into actually reading. So far I have read the following and feel a bit confused so any suggestions would be welcome.

Astonishing X-Men Vol. 1

Uncanny X-Force Vol. 1

Wolverine

Lol the Recommended Reading List for X-Men on this site has been suspect since before i was ever a poster.. but

But here's what most of us agree (though i'm sure i'll get yelled at is the current X-Men Reading Order from 2001-> 2015.

1. New X-Men (Morrison)
2. Astonishing X-Men (Whedon)
3. House of M
4. Deadly Genesis
5. Decimation
6. Civil War
7. Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire
8. Messiah Complex
9. Manifest Destiny
10. Utopia
11. Nation X
12. Uncanny X-Force
13. Second Coming
14. Fear Itself
15. Schism
16. AvX
17. All New X-Men "Here comes yesterday"
18. Uncanny X-Men Vol. 3 (Brian Michael Bendis)
    
    I'm sure someone else can point out what is essential, but these are the major stories.

@koays: Thanks for the reply. So Morrison's run is considered a good jumping off point? No need for anything earlier?

Morrison's New X-Men (2001) is a decent jumping on point, but a lot of fans will tell you it's not all that great. Most of what you need to know about it is touched on in Whedon's Astonishing X-Men (2004) which is a much more agreed upon run. So I think it's fair to say you could start with Astonishing' if it interests you more. Or just read the first 1 or 2 New X-men trades (E is for Extinction and Imperial) for some context and then go to Gifted from there.

In the interest of making the task less daunting, of Koays list..

these would probably be plenty to get you up to speed. Deadly Genesis is kind of only super-relevant to Rise and Fall of the Sh'iar Empire, which itself (though decent) is a space opera with a bunch of X-men separated from the main team and had little lasting effect on the main story.

Civil War, while decent and certainly relevant to the MU as a whole, isn't really especially relevant to the X-men.

Most of the SF/Utopia-era stuff isn't all that great or especially relevant at this point. Some may disagree with me and say that the Messiah Trilogy stuff was important, but personally I don't see it. While the new direction was an interesting idea, it wasn't handled especially well in the main books, and you can probably get the relevant highlights from reading Uncanny X-Force(2010) and X-Men: Schism (2011).

@oldnightcrawler: Thanks, that was exceptionally helpful. A more condensed list definitely helps since I am already reading quite a bit as it is anyways.

@dingbat: happy to help.

@oldnightcrawler: Lol looking at it my list is incredibly a$$ backwards (its mostly lazily copied from a old list of major things that happened to the X-Men). But I think that if your not gonna read the Messiah trilogy there's not really much point in catching up on the back issues, since really that's what the 08->11 period was really about.

And really a list of just Good books or runs from that period looks completely different and doesn't contribute at all to a story flow.

maybe. I know I wouldn't spend the resources it took to get all of the Utopia-era books, so I simply can't in good conscience recommend that anyone else would. They aren't all bad, but they're certainly not worth the price of admission.