Books like

Books like Memoirs of Hadrian

12 books with a reading profile close to Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. Deep, contemplative and thought-provoking; a moderate read.

1

Darkness at Noon

by Arthur Koestler

Also deep and thought-provoking · history, philosophy

Set during the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, the story follows Nikolai Rubashov, an aging Bolshevik revolutionary arrested by the government he helped establish.
2

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.
3

War and Peace

by Лев Толстой

Also deep and contemplative · history, philosophy

Leo Tolstoy’s narrative tracks the intersecting lives of three main aristocratic families—the Rostovs, Bolkonskys, and Kuragins—during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
4

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.
5

The Scarlet Letter

by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Austin Warren

Also deep and contemplative · history, literary

Set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston, the narrative follows Hester Prynne, a woman forced to wear a scarlet "A" as a permanent mark of adultery after conceiving a child out of wedlock.
6

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.
7

Death Comes for the Archbishop

by Willa Cather

Also deep and contemplative · history, literary

Father Jean Marie Latour, a French cleric, travels to the newly acquired New Mexico Territory in 1851 to serve as Apostolic Vicar.
8

Songs of innocence and of experience

by William Blake

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

William Blake’s hand-colored collection contrasts two differing states of the human soul.
9

Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

Also deep and contemplative · 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.
10

Island

by Aldous Huxley

Also deep and thought-provoking · philosophy, literary

The story follows Will Farnaby, a cynical journalist who shipwrecks on the forbidden Pacific island of Pala.
11

The power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

Set in 1930s Mexico during the Cristero War, the narrative follows a nameless whiskey priest fleeing a paramilitary police force.
12

Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

Also deep and thought-provoking · history, literary

Lyman Ward, a retired historian living with a bone-deteriorating disability, spends his final years chronicling the lives of his grandparents, Susan and Oliver Ward.

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