Books like

Books like The Little Prince

12 books with a reading profile close to The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Deep, inward-looking, contemplative, open-ended and thought-provoking; an easy read.

1

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.
2

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.
3

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.
4

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.
5

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.
6

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.
7

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.
8

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.
9

Our Town

by Thornton Wilder

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

Set in the fictional village of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, between 1901 and 1913, this three-act play strips away traditional theatrical scenery to focus on the daily rhythms of the Gibbs and Webb families.
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

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.
12

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.

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