Here’s some stuff you can read if you want to get to the bottom of this….whatever “this” is. However, a word to the wise: the authors don’t know any more than you; they describe the “problem” very well but provide no answers. (Woolf’s confirmation!)
What “IS” the “problem”….???? the search for meaning.
The sacred texts do suggest the best way to live, so there’s that. (Also see the note at the bottom about translations and a few books/authors that I think are over-rated)
In order of importance (to me).
New Testament, Tao Te Ching, Dhamapada, Thirukural, Bhagavad Gita, Hindu Vedas….in fact just go here.
Thomas Carlyle – Sartor Resartus – Reads like the King James Bible but if you persevere, there are treasures here.
Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet – When I read this, I saw myself so clearly, I wondered if I was just a figment of Pessoa’s imagination….a heretofore unknown heteronym.
Marcel Proust – Swann’s Way (The first of the seven volume work IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME) In my view, no writer can match Proust as a wordsmith….Carlyle and Pessoa are above for their ideas.
Rainer Maria Rilke – The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Very similar to The Book of Disquiet in structure and to Swann’s Way in the tone and subject. Rilke is close behind Proust
Giacomo Leopardi – Zibaldone. Penetrating insight into the human condition. Early entries lean to philology and arcane references but it becomes more philosophical.
Virginia Woolf – Orlando – Modern critiques focus on the gender aspects but I believe that approach is limiting….Woolf has her sights on bigger targets, namely time, life, and meaning. Pages 294, 305
Henry David Thoreau – Walden! How could I have forgotten this for so long!? I read this….what 40 years ago and always considered it one of those books with wisdom on EVERY page.
Fernando Pessoa – Selected Prose
Pascal Mercier – Night Train to Lisbon – Heresy that I put this above Tolstoy? Perhaps but the psychological insights led me to put it above a better writer.
Tolstoy – A Confession
Pascal – Pensees (esp. #84 and #393)
Tolstoy – War and Peace
Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being – The internal dialogs of couples existing in an authoritarian state.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – Written by an anonymous author in the 14th c., this epic poem stirs my imagination and while the movie The Green Knight is very loosely based on the tale, there is an equally haunting mystery there as well. Read and watch.
Thomas Ligotti – The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Nietzsche – The Gay Science – This is where the “God is Dead” theme originated….not Zarathrustra as many think.
Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse
Tolstoy – Anna Karenina
Dostoevsky – The Brothers Karamazov
D.H. Lawrence – Women in Love – This may have been the very first book I read that revealed a hint of existentialism …. leading to my subsequent obsession with ontology.
D.H. Lawrence – Lady Chatterly’s Lover – Especially the letter at the end in which Mellors describes how life should be.
Goethe – The Sorrows of Young Werther
Pushkin – Eugene Onegin
Tolstoy – The Death of Ivan Ilyich
James Joyce – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
C.S. Lewis – A Grief Observed
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – The Gulag Archipelago (Not so much for the writing but for the revelation…..if you want camp stories by a master author, read “Kolyma Tales” by Varlam Shalamov)
C.S. Lewis – Surprised by Joy
Montaigne – Essays
Jose’ Saramago – The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
Jens Peter Jacobsen – Niels Lyhne – Good read but seemed to hasten to the denouement after dwelling on the early stages. Translation may be a factor in the English.
Robert Persig – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
William Blake – The Mental Traveler
Rudyard Kipling – The Gods of the Copybook Headings
If you read through the journal entries, you’ll see that I note here on this page only the books that appeal to me or that were disappointing. Many others just don’t make the cut either way.
TRANSLATIONS: I’m certainly no expert on this but if you’re going to read classics, it’s worth your time to research the translations. When one is translating a masterpiece of literature that deals with the most subtle nuances of human experience and which uses a VERY expansive vocabulary, the translator is a key component of reader’s experience.
I read Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” and thought it was a mediocre piece of literature. After reading reviews of different translations, I learned that I had read a very poor translation. I’m not sure I will try another because I just didn’t care for the book. Fortunately, I found good translations of Proust, Tolstoy, Pessoa, etc. and although I read a highly rated translation of Don Quixote, it still made it into my “overrated” list below!
Now for the books I thought were over-rated:
Ulysses – Quit after 50 pages. Started again – made it to 114. Recondite…..you are reading a writer who invented a language known only to him. Virginia Woolf agreed and that’s good enough for me.
The Diaries of Witold Gombrowicz – Egotistical, smug intellectual
The Satanic Verses – not a fan of magical realism
Infinite Jest-Love DFW’s interviews/graduation talk can’t read him.
The Man Without Qualities – but with flashes of brilliance
Madame Bovary-But read about Flaubert’s reaction to shaving.
Thus Spake Zarathrustra
Pilgrim’s Progress
Canterbury Tales
Don Quixote – although I feel the heat and hear the leather squeak.
HERE IS MY “TO BE READ” LIST:
A Priest’s Diary – Sigbjørn Obstfelder
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen – Who is to Blame?
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen – My Past and Thoughts
“Having asked then of man……what life is….and grown no wiser….(for did we not pray once in a way to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear it was life’s meaning?) back we must go and say straight out to the reader who waits…… to hear what life is – Alas we don’t know.” – Virginia Woolf in ORLANDO