Books like

Books like Mortality

12 books with a reading profile close to Mortality by Christopher Hitchens. Deep, inward-looking and contemplative; a moderate read.

1

The crack-up, with other uncollected pieces, note-books and unpublished letters, together with letters to Fitzgerald from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe and John Dos Passos, and essays and poems by Paul Rosenfeld [and others] Edited by Edmund Wilson

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, memoir

This collection centers on the psychological collapse of F.
2

Intimations

by Zadie Smith

Also deep · philosophy, memoir

Written during the early months of the 2020 pandemic, this collection consists of six essays that analyze the sudden contraction of physical space and the expansion of internal reflection.
3

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

by Paul Kalanithi

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, memoir

Paul Kalanithi was a neurosurgical resident nearing the end of his decade-long training when he was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer.
4

A Grief Observed

by C.S. Lewis

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, memoir

C.S.
5

De profundis

by Oscar Wilde

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, memoir

Written during his incarceration at Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde’s long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas details the emotional and financial ruin resulting from their relationship.
6

The House of the Dead

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, memoir

Alexandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, a nobleman sentenced to ten years of hard labor in Siberia for uxoricide, narrates his daily existence within a communal prison barracks.
7

Between the World and Me

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, memoir

Written as a letter to his teenage son, Ta-Nehisi Coates frames the black body as the central site of American history and civic stability.
8

Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

by Donald Miller

Also inward-looking · philosophy, memoir

Donald Miller presents a collection of essays documenting his personal shift from structured, legalistic Christianity to a more organic faith.
9

The Razor’s Edge

by W. Somerset Maugham

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

Larry Darrell returns to Chicago from the battlefields of World War I, but find himself unable to settle into a conventional social life or a marriage with his fiancée, Isabel Bradley.
10

Bad Feminist

by Roxane Gay

philosophy, memoir

Roxane Gay uses this collection of essays to analyze the contradictions between feminist ideology and contemporary pop culture.
11

The Old Man and the Sea

by Ernest Hemingway

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

Set in a small Cuban fishing village in 1952, the story follows Santiago, an aging fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without a catch.
12

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

Also deep and inward-looking · memoir, literary

In August 2022, thirty-three years after the fatwa against him, Salman Rushdie was attacked on stage at the Chautauqua Institution.

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