Books like

Books like Macbeth

12 books with a reading profile close to Macbeth by William Shakespeare. Deep, inward-looking, contemplative, open-ended and thought-provoking; a moderate read.

1

Songs of innocence and of experience

by William Blake

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

William Blake’s hand-colored collection contrasts two differing states of the human soul.
2

Poems by John Keats

by John Keats

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

John Keats’s debut collection, published in March 1817 rather than 1800, organizes lyrical meditations on the restorative capacity of the natural world and the permanence of classical mythology.
3

Eugene Onegin

by Alexander Pushkin

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse follows Eugene Onegin, a cynical aristocrat weary of Saint Petersburg’s high society.
4

Alcestis

by Euripides

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

In this tragedy, King Admetus is granted a reprieve from his impending death on the condition that someone else dies in his place.
5

Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

Gustav von Aschenbach, a disciplined German writer who has prioritized rigorous intellect over sensory pleasure, travels to Venice to escape a creative drought.
6

Rubāʻīyāt

by Omar Khayyam

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

This 1870 edition presents a collection of quatrains attributed to the eleventh-century Persian mathematician Omar Khayyam, translated into English verse by Edward FitzGerald.
7

The power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

Set in 1930s Mexico during the Cristero War, the narrative follows a nameless whiskey priest fleeing a paramilitary police force.
8

Fathers and Sons

by Ivan Turgenev

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

Arkady Kirsanov returns from university to his father's estate in 1859, bringing his friend Yevgeny Bazarov, a medical student and self-declared nihilist who rejects authority, art, and tradition.
9

Measure for Measure

by William Shakespeare

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, literary

Duke Vincentio departs Vienna under a pretext of travel, leaving the puritanical Angelo to enforce long-ignored moral laws.
10

The Tartar Steppe

by Dino Buzzati

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

Giovanni Drogo, a young officer, is posted to the Bastiani Fortress, an isolated outpost on the northern frontier overlooking a barren plain.
11

The Stranger

by Albert Camus

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

In Algiers, a clerk named Meursault receives news of his mother’s death and attends her funeral with complete emotional detachment.
12

Metamorphoses

by Ovid

Also deep · philosophy, literary

Ovid’s hexameter narrative tracks the history of the world from its chaotic origins to the assassination of Julius Caesar.

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