Live the Examined Life
Discover the best books to live an examined life. Explore insightful reads that inspire self-reflection, wisdom, and personal growth for a more meaningful existence.
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We the Living
by Ayn Rand
Traces the impact of the Russian Revolution on three people who try to challenge the new regime
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Blindness
by José Saramago
A stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. "This is a shattering work by a literary master."--The Boston Globe A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers--among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears--through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses--and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit.
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The Fall
by Albert Camus
NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR • One of the most widely read novels of all time—from one of the best-known writers of all time—about a lawyer from Paris who brilliantly illuminates the human condition. Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.
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City of God
by E. L. Doctorow
Beginning in mystery--the theft of a large brass cross from St. Timothy's Episcopal Church and its reappearance on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism--this mordantly funny bestseller by the author of "Billy Bathgate" and "The Waterworks" emerges as a narrative of the 20th century written for the 21st. "Dazzling . . . heartbreaking, and superb".--"The Miami Herald".
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Penguin Classics Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
'One of the greatest love stories in world literature' Vladimir Nabokov The heroine of Tolstoy's epic of love and self-destruction, Anna Karenina has beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son, but feels that her life is empty until she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike, and brings jealousy and bitterness in its wake. Contrasting with this is the vividly observed story of Levin, a man striving to find contentment and a meaning to his life - and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself. This award-winning translation has been acclaimed as the definitive English version of Tolstoy's masterpiece. Translated by RICHARD PEVEAR and LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY with a Preface by JOHN BAYLEY
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Underworld
by Don DeLillo
A finalist for the National Book Award, Don DeLillo's most powerful and riveting novel--"a great American novel, a masterpiece, a thrilling page-turner" (San Francisco Chronicle)--Underworld is about the second half of the twentieth century in America and about two people, an artist and an executive, whose lives intertwine in New York in the fifties and again in the nineties. With cameo appearances by Lenny Bruce, J. Edgar Hoover, Bobby Thompson, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor, "this is DeLillo's most affecting novel...a dazzling, phosphorescent work of art" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
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The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
New chronology and updated further reading. Edited with an Introduction by A. S. Byatt.
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No Exit and Three Other Plays
by Jean-Paul Sartre
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • Four seminal plays by one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. An existential portrayal of Hell in Sartre's best-known play, as well as three other brilliant, thought-provoking works: the reworking of the Electra-Orestes story, the conflict of a young intellectual torn between theory and conflict, and an arresting attack on American racism.
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Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense—a masterful novel of "political intrigue and philosophy, romance and noir" (Vogue) and the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism from the Nobel Prize winner. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head-scarves. But Ka is also drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced. Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka finds himself pursued by figures ranging from Ipek’s ex-husband to a charismatic terrorist. A lost gift returns with ecstatic suddenness. A theatrical evening climaxes in a massacre. And finding god may be the prelude to losing everything else.
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The Trial
by Franz Kafka
From one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis: Written in 1914 but not published until 1925, a year after Kafka’s death, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.
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Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
An epic novel of Russia before and during the Revolution.