Books like

Books like Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

12 books with a reading profile close to Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life by C.S. Lewis. Deep, inward-looking and contemplative; a moderate read.

1

Gandhi: An Autobiography

by Mahatma Gandhi

Also inward-looking and contemplative · philosophy, memoir

In this memoir, Mohandas K.
2

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

by Barack Obama

Also inward-looking and contemplative · biography, memoir

Barack Obama reconstructs his personal history and identity as a biracial man in America through a narrative that spans Honolulu, Chicago, and Kenya.
3

Autobiography of a Yogi

by Paramahansa Yogananda

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, memoir

Paramahansa Yogananda recounts his search for a spiritual teacher in early twentieth-century India, leading to his apprenticeship under the swami Sri Yukteswar Giri.
4

The crack-up, with other uncollected pieces, note-books and unpublished letters, together with letters to Fitzgerald from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe and John Dos Passos, and essays and poems by Paul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.
5

Mortality

by Christopher Hitchens

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, memoir

Christopher Hitchens chronicles his final eighteen months following a stage four esophageal cancer diagnosis.
6

Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

by Lulu Miller

Also inward-looking and contemplative · philosophy, memoir

Part biography and part memoir, this book follows Lulu Miller’s investigation into David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist who spent his life naming thousands of new fish species and rebuilding his collection after the 1906 Sa…
7

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.
8

The Imitation of Christ

by Thomas à Kempis

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy

Written as a set of instructions for the inner life, this text posits that spiritual progress requires the systematic rejection of worldly vanity and the active suppression of the ego.
9

Educated

by Tara Westover

Also inward-looking and contemplative · biography, memoir

Tara Westover recounts her upbringing in a survivalist Mormon family in the mountains of Idaho.
10

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.
11

The Story of My Life

by Helen Keller

Also inward-looking and contemplative · biography, memoir

In this memoir, Helen Keller details her childhood following a severe illness that left her both blind and deaf at nineteen months old.
12

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.

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