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Recommend me some philosophical fiction books

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fuzzyreactor

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It's been awhile since I've read a good book that has changed my perception about life in some way. I'm looking for something philosophical but also tells an interesting story. I've read stuff from Dostoevsky, Orwell, Vonnegut, Hesse, Tolstoy, Camus, etc. Avoid fantasy if possible and I would prefer something more modern.
 
Flatland - Edmund Edwin Abbott Abbott. It's a novella, maybe 100-150 pages. It's public domain (and thus free). It's fiction and philosophy, but maybe not in the way you expect. It's not modern but the writing is surprisingly undated--you could read it and assume it was made today. It's not fantasy in the sense of high dragons or other nonsense like that, it's very grounded. The only fantastic elements exist to enable the philosophical point.
 
How to Survive in a Science Fiction Universe by Charles Yu. I went into it thinking it was a comedy sci fi book modeled after Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but instead it's a pretty heartfelt heavily Buddhism influenced philosophical adventure about being present in the present rather than dwelling on the past or fantasizing about the future. It was very, very good.
 
La Nausea, or if you want something a little more current, The Myth of Sisyphus.
 
Both J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and The Life and Times of Michael K would probably be up your alley. I even read one in a fiction literature philosophy class.
 
Not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for..but I majored in philosophy, and Haruki Murakami's books have given me philosophical pause from time to time. They're generally modern stories that take place in the real world (Japan, usually) that have a bunch of fairly surreal elements. A couple of them go to some pretty profound places.

He's not exactly Dostoevsky in terms of philosophical content (I've read Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov) ...but he might be worth checking out. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a decent starting point.
 
ANi6DXC.jpg


Gnosticism, Plato, Carl Jung, Buddhism - it' all here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS
 
Secret_Riddle said:
Not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for..but I majored in philosophy, and Haruki Murakami's books have given me philosophical pause from time to time. They're generally modern stories that take place in the real world (Japan, generally) that have a bunch of fairly surreal elements. A couple of them go to some pretty profound places.

He's not exactly Dostoevsky in terms of philosophical content (I've read Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov) ...but he might be worth checking out. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a decent starting point.
Click to expand...
I might check this out. I'm on the fourth book of Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy, which spans 80 years of 20th century Japan and explores concepts of meaning through the shifting culture. It's really fascinating.
 
the unbearable lightness of being - milan kundera

it tackles ideas about what it means for your life to exist only once woven into a good, beautifully written story about love in the czech republic under the soviet union.
 
Secret_Riddle said:
Not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for..but I majored in philosophy, and Haruki Murakami's books have given me philosophical pause from time to time. They're generally modern stories that take place in the real world (Japan, generally) that have a bunch of fairly surreal elements. A couple of them go to some pretty profound places.

He's not exactly Dostoevsky in terms of philosophical content (I've read Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov) ...but he might be worth checking out. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a decent starting point.
Click to expand...

I'll echo this recommendation. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the Universe is a particularly interesting philosophical work.

Also LeGuin's Sci-Fi novels may be up your alley. The Dispossessed especially.

The Handmaiden's Tale (another Sci-Fi work)

R. Scott Baker's Prince of Nothing series is a way less grounded fantasy (I know, but maybe try it) look at philosophy from a more metaphysical way than the ones listed above.
 
teruterubozu said:
Gnosticism, Plato, Carl Jung, Buddhism - it' all here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS
Click to expand...

Also one of his more bat-shit novels and highly influenced by his real life paranoia. Unfortunately it reads that way as well. I've always preferred his more grounded work, which is a bit more limited.

Empty said:
the unbearable lightness of being - milan kundera

it tackles ideas about what it means for your life to exist only once woven into a good, beautifully written story about love in the czech republic under the soviet union.
Click to expand...
I plan to read this very soon. I read The Joke a few years ago and thought it was outstanding.
 
MadSexual said:
I might check this out. I'm on the fourth book of Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy, which spans 80 years of 20th century Japan and explores concepts of meaning through the shifting culture. It's really fascinating.
Click to expand...

Definitely Yukio Mishima. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is a great philosophical quandary. Other Japanese authors like Kobe Abe - Woman in the Dunes - is also rooted heavily in Existentialism. Murakami follows that tradition somewhat in that "detached observer" sense, but that's a staple of Japanese classic literature.

MadSexual said:
Also one of his more bat-shit novels and highly influenced by his real life paranoia. Unfortunately it reads that way as well. I've always preferred his more grounded work, which is a bit more limited.
Click to expand...

His "Exegesis" is the most insane thing ever - a thousand pages of philosophical paranoia.
 
Kobo Abe is great. He is bit like Camus but his work has this surreal quality that I really like. Woman in the Dunes, Face of Another and Ruined Map are probably best books to start with. If you like them, then move onwards towards his more surreal books like the box man and Secret Rendezvous.

kenzaburo oe is another Japanese writer whom you should check out. He is best in short story form but his novels are good too. I read bunch of Oe novels during last year and I would rank them like this:

a healing family
the silent cry
a quiet life
teach us to outgrow our madness
nip the buds, shoot the kids
seventeen and j
a personal matter
rouse up o young men of the new age
the changeling
 
ЯAW;110966053 said:
Kobo Abe is great. He is bit like Camus but his work has this surreal quality that I really like. Woman in the Dunes, Face of Another and Ruined Map are probably best books to start with. If you like them, then move onwards towards his more surreal books like the box man and Secret Rendezvous.
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The film adaptations are also excellent cinema.
 
Again not modern, but you might consider a book of Zen Koans

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0887060609/?tag=neogaf0e-20

Zen koans are basically little self-contained one-to-two paragraph or even less short stories intended to express a point about the nature of zen; I am not sure if the consensus is that the stories really happened or are fiction, but I've always looked at them as convenient fiction in the same way that Plato's dialogues likely did not actually happen but work in service of the philosophical point.
 
Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder is also a great beginner's philosophy book disguised as fiction - kinda like Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
 
Given that you listed Orwell, I'm assuming you've read Brave New World by Huxley. If not, check that out. And if you can track down Brave New World Revisited, check that out too.
 
2666 by Roberto Bolano

"lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared."

I think you'll like it.

2666cover.jpg


Edit: And for religiousity, Master and Margarita by Bulgakov.
 
Oh yeah, Sons of Kafka aka W. G. Sebald, JM Coetzee and Philip Roth are/were spectacular authors. I especially loved Sebald's "traveller trilogy" (Vertigo, Emigrants and Rings of Saturn). Sebald is often told to be writer's author but, I found his novels great nonetheless and they weren't pretentious like some of my friends described them.
 
Anything is a philosophical work if you think about it hard enough.

Flatland is a very good recommendation.

I would secretly recommend Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida as a weirdly postmodern work that's not even sort of about the Trojan War.
 
Lord Fagan said:
I haven't read that one yet, but I guess I should get on it, yeah?
Click to expand...

Very much so. Sort of an alternate world were instead of saints there are saunts (shortened from savants) and a sort of cloistered mathematician/scientist/philosopher monk class. I don't even want to go into more detail as it goes to some pretty crazy places, particularly towards the end, and I would hate to inadvertently spoil anything.
 
I recommend "God's Debris: A Thought Experiment" by Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert).

Warning: avoid the Wikipedia article as the first paragraph contains major spoilers.
 
Stumpokapow said:
Flatland - Edmund Edwin Abbott Abbott. It's a novella, maybe 100-150 pages. It's public domain (and thus free). It's fiction and philosophy, but maybe not in the way you expect. It's not modern but the writing is surprisingly undated--you could read it and assume it was made today. It's not fantasy in the sense of high dragons or other nonsense like that, it's very grounded. The only fantastic elements exist to enable the philosophical point.
Click to expand...

After this, don't forget to check out Flatterland.
 
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