Books like

Books like Anathem

12 books with a reading profile close to Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Deep, open-ended and thought-provoking; a demanding read.

1

God Emperor of Dune

by Frank Herbert

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

Set thirty-five hundred years after the reign of Paul Atreides, the narrative follows Leto II, a human-sandworm hybrid who maintains absolute control over the galaxy.
2

Children of Dune

by Frank Herbert

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

Nine years after Paul Atreides walked into the desert, his twin children, Leto II and Ghanima, face a fracturing empire.
3

Machines like Me

by Ian McEwan

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, science fiction

In a version of 1982 where Britain lost the Falklands War, Alan Turing is alive and artificial intelligence has advanced a long way.
4

Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

Also deep and open-ended · dense, science fiction

Cloud Atlas follows six interlocking narratives that span from the mid-nineteenth-century Pacific Ocean to a post-apocalyptic Hawaiian future.
5

Roadside Picnic

by Arkady Strugatsky

Also deep · philosophy, science fiction

The narrative follows Redrick Schuhart, a professional stalker who illegally ventures into the Zone, one of several locations on Earth littered with mysterious debris following a brief extraterrestrial visit.
6

Foucault’s Pendulum

by Umberto Eco

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

Three editors at a vanity publishing house in Milan—Belbo, Casaubon, and Diotallevi—invent a grand historical conspiracy to amuse themselves.
7

Dead Souls

by Nikolai Gogol

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

Chichikov, a mysterious gentleman of middling rank and no obvious fortune, drives a britzka into a provincial Russian town and charms the local officials.
8

Man and Superman

by George Bernard Shaw

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

In this four-act drama, George Bernard Shaw uses the character of John Tanner, an intellectual revolutionary, to argue that women are the primary pursuers in human courtship.
9

Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited

by Aldous Huxley

Also deep and thought-provoking · philosophy, dense

Aldous Huxley depicts a future World State where biological engineering and psychological conditioning replace natural birth and individual thought.
10

Essays of three decades

by Thomas Mann

Also deep · philosophy, dense

This collection brings together sixteen of Mann’s non-fiction pieces written between 1911 and 1937, focusing on the intellectual heritage of Europe.
11

We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Also deep and thought-provoking · philosophy, science fiction

D-503 is a mathematician and the chief engineer of the Integral, a spacecraft designed to bring the ideology of the One State to other planets.
12

The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides

by Aeschylus

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

Aeschylus's trilogy, the only complete surviving set of Greek tragedies, follows the house of Atreus after the Trojan War.

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