Books like

Books like The Unbearable Lightness of Being

12 books with a reading profile close to The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Deep, inward-looking, contemplative, open-ended and thought-provoking; a moderate read.

1

The Metamorphosis

by Franz Kafka

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

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.
2

The Tartar Steppe

by Dino Buzzati

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

Giovanni Drogo, a young officer, is posted to the Bastiani Fortress, an isolated outpost on the northern frontier overlooking a barren plain.
3

Rubāʻīyāt

by Omar Khayyam

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

This 1870 edition presents a collection of quatrains attributed to the eleventh-century Persian mathematician Omar Khayyam, translated into English verse by Edward FitzGerald.
4

The Stranger

by Albert Camus

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

In Algiers, a clerk named Meursault receives news of his mother’s death and attends her funeral with complete emotional detachment.
5

Waiting for the Barbarians

by J.M. Coetzee

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, classic literature

A magistrate runs a small frontier town in an unnamed empire.
6

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

A cynical protagonist, convinced that nothing in the universe possesses objective value, decides to commit suicide.
7

One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

by Luigi Pirandello

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

Vitangelo Moscarda, a man of comfortable means who has inherited a bank from his father, is told by his wife that his nose is crooked.
8

Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

Gustav von Aschenbach, a disciplined German writer who has prioritized rigorous intellect over sensory pleasure, travels to Venice to escape a creative drought.
9

Poems by John Keats

by John Keats

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

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.
10

Songs of innocence and of experience

by William Blake

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

William Blake’s hand-colored collection contrasts two differing states of the human soul.
11

Medea

by Euripides

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

Euripides depicts the psychological collapse and subsequent vengeance of Medea, a Colchian princess abandoned by her husband, Jason.
12

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

by Emily Dickinson

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

This collection gathers the lyrical output of a recluse who examined the intersections of nature, mortality, and the inner self.

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