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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Robert M. Pirsig · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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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

Finding PurposePhilosophySelf-DiscoveryDense Prose
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What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Haruki Murakami · 179 pages

Finding PurposeSlow-PacedSelf-DiscoveryPhilosophy
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Finding PurposeFather and SonSelf-DiscoverySlow-Paced
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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.

Finding PurposePhilosophySelf-DiscoverySlow-Paced
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Walden

Henry David Thoreau · 260 pages

PhilosophySelf-DiscoveryDense ProseSlow-Paced
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Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse · 130 pages

Hermann Hesse wrote Siddhartha after he traveled to India in the 1910s. It tells the story of a young boy who travels the country in a quest for spiritual enlightenment in the time of Guatama Buddha. It is a compact, lyrical work, which reads like an allegory about the finding of wisdom.

PhilosophyFather and SonFinding PurposeSlow-Paced
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The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Eckhart Tolle · 216 pages

Eckhart Tolle has emerged as one of today's most inspiring teachers. In The Power of Now, already a worldwide bestseller, the author describes his transition from despair to self-realization soon after his 29th birthday. Tolle took another ten years to understand this transformation, during which time he evolved a philosophy that has parallels in Buddhism, relaxation techniques, and meditation the

Finding PurposeSelf-DiscoverySlow-PacedPhilosophy
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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Jean-Dominique Bauby · 141 pages

The author, former editor of French Elle magazine, describes the rare stroke to the brain stem that left his mind intact in a nearly totally paralyzed body.

Father and SonSlow-PacedSelf-DiscoveryPhilosophy
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Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · 155 pages

An Amazon Best Book of July 2015: Readers of his work in The Atlantic and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “

Father and SonSelf-DiscoveryDense ProseSlow-Paced
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The Agony and the Ecstasy

Irving Stone · 710 pages

Mr. Stone gives his signature style and thought to this story of Michelangelo. He points out often in this book that Michelangelo, before beginning a work, asks what it is he is trying to capture in the moment of his painting, sculpture, or poem. So it is with Mr. Stone. He wants to portray, as close as he can find, the moments of the life of this artist. What shaped him, what he loved, what (and

Finding PurposeSlow-PacedDense ProsePhilosophy
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Into the Wild

Jon Krakauer · 207 pages

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose

Finding PurposeTravel WritingSelf-DiscoveryPhilosophy
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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

Finding PurposePhilosophyTravel WritingSelf-Discovery
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The Prophet

Kahlil Gibran · 107 pages

Reflections by the Lebanese poet, mystic, and painter on such subjects as love, marriage, joy and sorrow, crime and punishment, pain, and self-knowlege.

PhilosophyFinding PurposeSlow-PacedSelf-Discovery
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Lady Chatterley's Lover

D.H. Lawrence · 322 pages

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

Self-DiscoveryTechnology and SocietySlow-PacedPhilosophy
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Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace · 1,088 pages

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connec

Technology and SocietySlow-PacedPhilosophyDense Prose
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Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Friedrich Nietzsche · 327 pages

PhilosophySelf-DiscoverySlow-PacedDense Prose
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The Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle · 332 pages

An detailed examination of what the best life might be for human beings. In order to anwer this question, Aristotle finds he also has to examine what virtue itself is and all of the various virtues that might make up the best life.

PhilosophyFinding PurposeDense ProseSlow-Paced
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Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk · 208 pages

A man who struggles with insomnia meets a colorful extremist, and they create a secret organization together. Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation’s most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club’s estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the base

PhilosophyTechnology and SocietySelf-DiscoveryFather and Son
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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.

PhilosophyFinding PurposeSlow-PacedSelf-Discovery
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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

Finding PurposeSelf-DiscoveryPhilosophySlow-Paced
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The Adolescent

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 580 pages

Nineteen-year-old Arkady Dolgonsky has difficulty establishing his personal identity amid the political and social upheavals of nineteenth-century Russia.

Father and SonPhilosophySlow-PacedSelf-Discovery
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Self-Reliance and Other Essays

Ralph Waldo Emerson · 108 pages

PhilosophySelf-DiscoveryDense ProseNonfiction
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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

Finding PurposeTravel WritingSelf-DiscoveryMemoir & Biography
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The Myth of Sisyphus

Albert Camus · 169 pages

One of the most influential works of this century, The Myth of Sisyphus--featured here in a stand-alone edition--is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide--the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Albert Camus brilliantly

PhilosophySlow-PacedDense ProseSelf-Discovery
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