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The Dharma Bums

Jack Kerouac · 204 pages

The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in Kerouac's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950s. The book co

Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

Richard Bach · 144 pages

Wonderfully written, a glimpse into faith, self-reliance and friendship, witty and thought provoking. Barnstorming pilot meets a messianic man who has misgivings about his purpose. His scripture is captured in a greasy spiral bound notebook and he changes the lives of all he meets.

Eat, Pray, Love

Elizabeth Gilbert · 341 pages

This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cult

The Razor's Edge

W. Somerset Maugham · 314 pages

This novel, supposedly based on the life of an acquaintance of Maugham, follows the fortunes of an American pilot who, traumatized by war, rejects his former conventional life to search for a more meaningful existence. After studying in Paris for two years he decides to travel, taking various menial jobs. Although being influenced by some of the people he meets it is not until he reaches India tha

Narcissus and Goldmund

Hermann Hesse · 313 pages

Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives

Dan Millman · 211 pages

A world champion athlete visits "other worlds" with the help of an old warrior named "Socrates."

Before I Die

Jenny Downham · 332 pages

A terminally ill teenaged girl makes and carries out a list of things to do before she dies.

Hinds' Feet On High Places

Hannah Hurnard · 320 pages

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

C.S. Lewis · 238 pages

Autobiography of the English theologian, novelist, and scholar, concerning his early years. The author's spiritual journey from Chrisitanity to atheism and then back to Christianity.

Peter Camenzind

Hermann Hesse, Michael E. Roloff · 201 pages

Nausea

Jean-Paul Sartre · 238 pages

Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature, Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist, holds a position of singular eminence in the world of letters. Among readers and critics familiar with the whole of Sartre's work, it is generally recognized that his earliest novel, La Nausée (first published in 1938), is his finest and most significant. It is unquestionably a key

Sweetbitter

Stephanie Danler · 356 pages

A lush, raw, thrilling novel of the senses about a year in the life of a uniquely beguiling young woman, set in the wild, alluring world of a famous downtown New York restaurant.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Cheryl Strayed · 315 pages

A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she'd lost everything when her mother died young of cancer. Her family scattered in their grief, her marriage was soon destroyed, and slowly her life spun out of control. Four years after her mot

The Death of Ivan Ilych

Leo Tolstoy · 76 pages

Ivan Ilych, a peaceful public official in the Russian provinces, has his life permanently changed by a serious illness which no doctor can accurately diagnose.

Me Before You

Jojo Moyes · 451 pages

Louisa Clark is an ordinary young woman living an exceedingly ordinary life—steady boyfriend, close family—who has never been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex-Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair-bound after an accident. Will has always lived a huge life—big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel—and now he’s pretty sure he cann

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?

Johan Harstad · 524 pages

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion opens with the line: "The person you love is 72.8% water, and it hasn't rained for weeks." From there, Brage Award winning author and playwright tells the story of Mattias, a thirty-something gardener living in Stavanger, Norway, whose idol is Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon: the man who was willing to stand in Neil Armstrong's shadow in o

The Moviegoer

Walker Percy · 241 pages

Kate's desperate struggles to maintain her sanity force Binx to relinquish his dreamworld.

Up to This Pointe

Jennifer Longo · 360 pages

Devastated when her dream of becoming a professional ballerina falls through, seventeen-year-old Harper Scott takes a job as a research assistant, wintering over at McMurdo, a U.S. science station at the tip of Antarctica where, for the first time, she considers other possible futures.

Letters to a Young Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke · 109 pages

Letters written to F.X. Kappus during the years 1903-1908. Chronicle of Rilkes's life for the years 1903-1908 (p. 81-123).

Mutant Message Down Under

Marlo Morgan · 187 pages

Mutant Message Down Under is the fictional account of an American woman's spiritual odyssey through outback Australia. An underground bestseller in its original self-published edition, Marlo Morgan's powerful tale of challenge and endurance has a message for us all. Summoned by a remote tribe of nomadic Aborigines to accompany them on walkabout, the woman makes a four-month-long journey and lea

The Collected Regrets of Clover

Mikki Brammer · 320 pages

La liste des regrets

Mikki Brammer, Emmanuelle Urien · 500 pages

The Outcasts of Time

Ian Mortimer · 400 pages

I Am the Messenger

Markus Zusak · 386 pages