Books like

Books like Ariel

12 books with a reading profile close to Ariel by Sylvia Plath. Deep, inward-looking and open-ended; a moderate read.

1

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

by James Joyce, James Joyce

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

Stephen Dedalus grows up in Ireland, navigating the strictures of a Catholic education and the turbulent political climate of Irish nationalism.
2

Villette

by Charlotte Brontë

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

Lucy Snowe, a plain, reserved young Englishwoman with no family, leaves for the town of Villette in the fictional country of Labassecour, a thinly disguised Belgium.
3

The Portrait of a Lady

by Henry James

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

Isabel Archer, a spirited young American, travels to Victorian England to seek independence rather than a conventional marriage.
4

The Collected Poems

by Sylvia Plath

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

This chronological assembly spans Plath’s creative output from 1956 until her death in 1963.
5

Letter to His Father

by Franz Kafka

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

In this unsent document, Franz Kafka addresses his father, Hermann Kafka, to dissect their dysfunctional relationship and the psychological damage caused by his father’s overbearing personality.
6

Tender is the Night

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

Dick Diver is a promising American psychiatrist living on the French Riviera during the 1920s.
7

Lolita

by Vladimir Nabokov

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

Humbert Humbert is an academic who feels an intense attraction to young girls he calls nymphets.
8

Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

Rodion Raskolnikov, a destitute former student living in a cramped St.
9

Mrs. Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

Clarissa Dalloway spends a June Wednesday in 1925 London purchasing flowers and preparing her home for an evening gala.
10

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

by Edward Albee

Also deep and inward-looking · classic literature, psychology

Middle-aged history professor George and his wife Martha return home after a campus party and invite a younger couple, Nick and Honey, for late-night drinks.
11

Confessions of a Mask

by Yukio Mishima, Meredith Weatherby

Also deep and inward-looking · classic literature, psychology

The novel chronicles the internal struggles of its narrator, Kochan, as he navigates his adolescence and young adulthood in post-war Japan.
12

Shakespeare's Sonnets

by William Shakespeare

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

This sequence of 154 sonnets follows a tripartite structure involving three distinct figures.

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