Books like

Books like Phantastes

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

1

Till We Have Faces

by C.S. Lewis

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

In this reimagining of the Cupid and Psyche myth, Orual, the queen of Glome, writes a legalistic grievance against the gods.
2

The Metamorphosis

by Franz Kafka

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman and his family’s sole financial provider, wakes up one morning to find he has become a giant, literal insect.
3

Grendel

by John Gardner

Also deep and thought-provoking · philosophy, literary

Grendel is told from the point of view of the monster from the Old English poem Beowulf.
4

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.
5

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.
6

Waiting for the Barbarians

by J.M. Coetzee

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

A magistrate runs a small frontier town in an unnamed empire.
7

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.
8

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.
9

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.
10

The Master and Margarita

by Mikhail Bulgakov

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, literary

The devil, naming himself Professor Woland, arrives in 1930s Moscow accompanied by a talking black cat and a violent retinue.
11

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

A cynical protagonist, convinced that nothing in the universe possesses objective value, decides to commit suicide.
12

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.

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