Literary theme analysis, by a book like {foo}
Books about Search For Meaning
Nine Stories
by J.D. Salinger
Nine short stories of insight into the human condition and its mysteries.
Nine Stories (1953) is a collection of short stories by American fiction writer J. D. Salinger published in April 1953. It includes two of his most famous short stories, "A Perfect Day for ... (Goodreads)
The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
A teenage boy's journey of self-discovery, navigating complexities of the adult world.
An angry, depressed 16-year-old (Holden Caulfield) lives in an unspecified institution in California after the end of World War II . After his discharge within a month, he intends to go live with his ... (Wikipedia)
An Abundance of Katherines
by John Green
A teenage boy's quest for love and self-discovery, learning to accept himself and find happiness.
Colin Singleton, a child prodigy living in Chicago , fears he will not maintain his genius as an adult. Over the span of his life, Colin has dated nineteen girls named Katherine, all spelled in that ... (Wikipedia)
NW
by Zadie Smith
A story of a group of friends in London navigating love and identity in their complex lives.
Set in northwest London, Zadie Smith’s brilliant tragicomic novel follows four locals—Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan—as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their ... (Goodreads)
Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse
A spiritual journey of self-discovery for a young man in search of enlightenment.
The story takes place in the ancient Nepalese kingdom of Kapilavastu . Siddhartha decides to leave his home in the hope of gaining spiritual illumination by becoming an ascetic wandering beggar of ... (Wikipedia)
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
A black man's journey towards self-actualization in a world of racial oppression.
The narrator, an unnamed black man, begins by describing his living conditions: an underground room wired with hundreds of electric lights, operated by power stolen from the city's electric grid. He ... (Wikipedia)
The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
A group of expatriates in 1920s Europe, struggling to come to terms with the aftermath of WWI.
On the surface, the novel is a love story between the protagonist Jake Barnes—a man whose war wound has made him unable to have sex—and the promiscuous divorcée usually identified as Lady Brett ... (Wikipedia)
Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert A. Heinlein
A human raised by Martians must find his place in a hostile Earth society.
The story focuses on a human raised on Mars and his adaptation to and understanding of humans and their culture. It is set in a post- Third World War United States, where organized religions are ... (Wikipedia)
The Dharma Bums
by Jack Kerouac
A journey of self-discovery, fueled by a passion for Buddhism and nature.
The character Japhy drives Ray Smith's story, whose penchant for simplicity and Zen Buddhism influenced Kerouac on the eve of the sudden and unpredicted success of, On the Road, . The action shifts ... (Wikipedia)
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A man's quest for happiness and meaning, resulting in a journey of self-realization.
The story opens with the narrator wandering the streets of St. Petersburg . He is contemplating the ridiculousness of his own life, and his recent realization that nothing matters to him any more. It ... (Wikipedia)
The Clown
by Heinrich Böll
A young man's reflective journey through post-war Germany, exploring the consequences of war.
Hans Schnier is the "Clown" of the novel's title. He is twenty-seven years old from a very wealthy family. At the beginning of the story he arrives in Bonn, Germany. As a clown, he had to travel ... (Wikipedia)
The Late Mattia Pascal
by Luigi Pirandello
A man's journey to reclaim his identity and freedom from a life of dullness and unhappiness.
The protagonist, Mattia Pascal, finds that his promising youth has, through misfortune or misdeed, dissolved into a dreary dead-end job and a miserable marriage. His inheritance and the woman he ... (Wikipedia)
Martin Eden
by Jack London
A young sailor's ambition for a better life leads him on a journey of self-improvement and exploration of the upper classes.
Living in Oakland at the beginning of the 20th century, Martin Eden struggles to rise above his destitute, proletarian circumstances through an intense and passionate pursuit of self-education, ... (Wikipedia)
Number9Dream
by David Mitchell
A young man's surreal journey of self-discovery in Tokyo, uncovering hidden truths.
David Mitchell follows his eerily precocious, globe-striding first novel, Ghostwritten , with a work that is in its way even more ambitious. In outward form, number9dream is a Dickensian ... (Goodreads)
On Heroes and Tombs
by Ernesto Sabato
A philosophical meditation on life, death, and the various forms of heroism.
Nineteen-year-old Martín Castillo is a boy from Buenos Aires trying to find his path in life. He meets and falls in love with Alejandra Vidal Olmos who with her father Fernando represents the "old", ... (Wikipedia)
Henderson the Rain King
by Saul Bellow
A man's journey of self-discovery, finding his place in the world through travel and adventure.
Eugene Henderson is a troubled middle-aged man. Despite his riches, high social status , and physical prowess, he feels restless and unfulfilled, and harbors a spiritual void that manifests itself as ... (Wikipedia)
The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
A young man's journey of self-discovery, as he confronts the meaninglessness of life.
The Moviegoer tells the story of Jack "Binx" Bolling, a young stock-broker in postwar New Orleans . The decline of tradition in the Southern United States , the problems of his family and his ... (Wikipedia)
A Wild Sheep Chase
by Haruki Murakami
A surreal journey of self-discovery through fantasy, reality, and the unknown.
This quasi-detective tale follows an unnamed, chain-smoking narrator and his adventures in Tokyo and Hokkaido in 1978. The story begins when the recently divorced protagonist, an advertisement ... (Wikipedia)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murakami
A surreal journey of self-discovery, exploring the inner and outer worlds.
The first part, "The Thieving Magpie", begins with the narrator, Toru Okada, a low-key and unemployed lawyer's assistant, being tasked by his wife, Kumiko, to find their missing cat. Kumiko suggests ... (Wikipedia)
The Basketball Diaries
by Jim Carroll
A teenage boy's struggles with addiction and his journey of self-discovery.
The urban classic coming-of-age story about sex, drugs, and basketball. Jim Carroll grew up to become a renowned poet and punk rocker. But in this memoir of the mid-1960's, set during his ... (Goodreads)
No Longer Human
by Osamu Dazai
A young man's struggles with emotional turmoil and suicidal ideation.
Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human , this leading postwar Japanese writer's second novel, tells the poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a ... (Goodreads)
Ferdydurke
by Witold Gombrowicz
A man is magically regressed to adolescence, exploring the absurdities of adulthood.
In this bitterly funny novel by the renowned Polish author Witold Gombrowicz. a writer finds himself tossed into a chaotic world of schoolboys by a diabolical professor who wishes to reduce him to ... (Goodreads)
Excellent Women
by Barbara Pym
A shy spinster's journey of self-discovery, exploring the limitations of life as a single woman in 1950s England.
The book details the everyday life of its narrator, Mildred Lathbury, , a spinster in her thirties in 1950s Britain. Perpetually self-deprecating, but with the sharpest wit, Mildred is a part-time ... (Wikipedia)
Rabbit Redux
by John Updike
A man's mid-life crisis leads him to grapple with the moral and social issues of his time.
Rabbit Redux finds former high-school basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom working a dead-end job as a Linotype operator at the local printing plant. Thirty-six, he feels that he is quickly ... (Wikipedia)
10:04
by Ben Lerner
A poet's journey through life, confronting the obstacles of mortality and identity.
In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unlikely literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal medical condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her ... (Goodreads)
Looking for Alaska
by John Green
A teenage boy's journey across America in search of the meaning of life.
Miles Halter, a teenage boy obsessed with last words, leaves his normal high school in Florida to attend Culver Creek Preparatory High School in Alabama for his junior year. Miles' reasoning for such ... (Wikipedia)
Vineland
by Thomas Pynchon
A comedic journey of a family struggling to find a sense of identity and purpose.
The story is set in California, United States, in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan 's reelection. , After a scene in which former hippie Zoyd Wheeler dives through a window, something he is required ... (Wikipedia)
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
Exploring the lives of diverse characters in a small Southern town, unearthing secrets and desires.
The book begins with a focus on the relationship between two close friends, John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos, deaf-mutes who have lived together for several years. Antonapoulos becomes mentally ... (Wikipedia)
The Sorrows of Young Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A young man's struggle to reconcile his intense emotions with the realities of society.
This is Goethe's first novel, published in 1774. Written in diary form, it tells the tale of an unhappy, passionate young man hopelessly in love with Charlotte, the wife of a friend - a man who he ... (Goodreads)
Portrait in Sepia
by Isabel Allende
A woman's search for her true identity, connecting the past and present.
Portrait in Sepia is the sequel to, Daughter of Fortune, and follows the story of Aurora del Valle, the granddaughter of Eliza Sommers (, Hija de la fortuna, ). The daughter of Lynn Sommers (the ... (Wikipedia)
The Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolaño
A poetic journey of two young poets searching for a mysterious figure through Latin America.
The novel is narrated in first person by several narrators and divided into three parts. The first section , "Mexicans Lost in Mexico", set in late 1975, is told by 17-year-old aspiring poet, Juan ... (Wikipedia)
Transit
by Rachel Cusk
A woman's journey of rediscovering herself after divorce, through encounters with others.
The stunning second novel of a trilogy that began with, Outline, one of, The New York Times Book Review,’s ten best books of 2015 . In the wake of family collapse, a writer and her two young sons ... (Goodreads)
The Razor's Edge
by W. Somerset Maugham
A spiritual journey in search of personal fulfillment, as an individual in a rapidly changing world.
Maugham begins by characterizing his story as not really a novel but a thinly veiled true account. He includes himself as a minor character, a writer who drifts in and out of the lives of the major ... (Wikipedia)
Hear the Wind Sing
by Haruki Murakami
A young man's journey of self-discovery and exploration of life's possibilities.
Feeling writing as a terribly painful task, the narrator re-tells the story of his 1970 summer. He was a student at a university in Tokyo then, and returned to his seaside hometown in Niigata for ... (Wikipedia)
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
by Marcel Proust
A young man's coming of age in a world of high society, exploring the depths of his own heart.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is Proust’s spectacular dissection of male and female adolescence, charged with the narrator’s memories of Paris and the Normandy seaside. At the heart of the ... (Goodreads)
Naïve. Super
by Erlend Loe
A humorous coming-of-age story of a young man's search for understanding and purpose in life.
The narrator of this funny and poignant novel is searching for meaning, going back to his childhood, onto the web and off to New York to find it. He writes lists, obsesses over the nature of time, ... (Goodreads)
Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
A darkly comic, nihilistic journey of self-discovery, following a man into the heart of an absurd world.
Céline’s masterpiece—colloquial, polemic, hyper-realistic, boiling over with black humor Céline’s masterpiece—colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic—boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at ... (Barnes & Noble)
Kom hier dat ik u kus
by Griet Op de Beeck
A young woman's journey of self-discovery, struggling to find her place in a complex world.
Kom hier dat ik u kus is een roman over Mona, als kind, als vierentwintigjarige, en als vijfendertigjarige. Een verhaal over waarom we worden wie we zijn, geschreven met humor, scherpte en veel ... (Goodreads)
The Zahir
by Paulo Coelho
A man's journey to understand the meaning of love and of life, in the face of loss.
The Zahir means 'the obvious' or 'conspicuous' in Arabic . The story revolves around the life of the narrator , a bestselling novelist, and in particular his search for his missing wife, Esther. He ... (Wikipedia)
Seeing
by José Saramago
A story of an old man's journey to find meaning in a world of chaos and suffering.
Seeing is set in the same unnamed country featured in, Blindness,. The story begins with a parliamentary election, in which the majority (83%) of the populace cast blank ballots. The first half of ... (Wikipedia)
The Rum Diary
by Hunter S. Thompson
A man's journey to find himself and meaningful work, set in a tropical paradise.
Begun in 1959 by a twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto ... (Goodreads)
الفيل الأزرق
by أحمد مراد
A young boy's journey of self-discovery, navigating complexities of tribal life in the Sahara.
بعد خمس سنوات من العُزلة الاختيارية يستأنف د. يحيى عمله في مستشفى العباسية للصحّة النفسية، حيث يجد في انتظاره مفاجأة.. في "8 غرب"، القسم الذي يقرّر مَصير مُرتكبي الجرائم، يُقابل صديقاً قديماً يحمل ... (Goodreads)
Nada
by Carmen Laforet
A young woman's journey to find her identity and place in the world.
The novel is set in post Spanish Civil War Barcelona. The novel is narrated by its main character, Andrea, an orphan, who has fond memories of her well off family in Barcelona, and has been raised in ... (Wikipedia)
Leaving the Atocha Station
by Ben Lerner
A young poet's journey of self-discovery, struggling to find a sense of purpose in life.
Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when ... (Goodreads)
Mist
by Miguel de Unamuno
A study of the power of faith and reason, exploring the depths of human existence.
The plot revolves around the character of Augusto, a wealthy, intellectual and introverted young man. He falls in love with a young woman named Eugenia as she walks past him on the street, and he ... (Wikipedia)
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
by George Orwell
A struggling poet's quest to remain independent and stay true to himself in a society obsessed with money.
Gordon Comstock has 'declared war' on what he sees as an 'overarching dependence' on money by leaving a promising job as a copywriter for an advertising company called 'New Albion '—at which he shows ... (Wikipedia)
The Twelve Chairs
by Ilya Ilf
A comedic tale of two men's quest for hidden jewels in a chair with a secret compartment.
In the Soviet Union in 1927, a former Marshal of Nobility , Ippolit Matveyevich "Kisa" Vorobyaninov, works as the registrar of marriages and deaths in a sleepy provincial town. His mother-in-law ... (Wikipedia)
The Deep End of the Ocean
by Jacquelyn Mitchard
A family coping with the loss of their son and their journey to reunite.
Wisconsin photographer and housewife Beth Cappadora leaves her youngest son, Ben, alone with his older brother for a brief moment in a crowded Chicago hotel lobby, while attending her high school ... (Wikipedia)
Samarkand
by Amin Maalouf
Epic tale of a man's journey to discover his identity and the truths of his ancestry.
The first half of the story is set in Persia (present day Iran ) and Central Asia in the 11th century, and revolves around the scientist, philosopher, and poet Omar Khayyám . It recounts the creation ... (Wikipedia)
The High Mountains of Portugal
by Yann Martel
A spiritual journey of three stories across Portugal, spanning three different time periods.
In Lisbon in 1904, a young man named Tomás discovers an old journal. It hints at the existence of an extraordinary artifact that—if he can find it—would redefine history. Traveling in one of Europe’s ... (Goodreads)
The Days: His Autobiography in Three Parts
by Taha Hussein
A reflection on the author's life, exploring his identity and sense of belonging.
كتاب "الأيام" أشهر من أن يعرّف، وهو بجانب قيمته الأدبية الرفيعة باعتباره طرازاً فريداً من السير الذاتية لشخصية أدبيه قل أن يجود الزمان بمثلها، وصدق وعذوبة وطلاوة أسلوب، وهى مزايا يكاد يستأثر بها، فإن ... (Goodreads)
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