Viktor Frankl in Auschwitz and the psychology he built from it; those with a why can bear any how.
A neurosurgeon diagnosed with lung cancer at 36 writes about it until he cannot.
A 14-year-old receives letters teaching the history of philosophy, then finds out who she is.
A girl against the grey men who steal people's time; Ende's fable about hurry.
The Library of Babel, the Garden of Forking Paths and Pierre Menard; Borges in seventeen stories.
Tomas, Tereza and Sabina in Prague 1968; Kundera's novel of philosophy and sex.
A concierge who hides her intelligence and a girl planning suicide in a Paris building.
Pessoa's assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares and his fragments; the anti-novel of Lisbon.
Harry Haller, half man and half wolf, and the Magic Theatre; Hesse's midlife crisis.
Two tramps wait by a tree for someone who does not come; the play of the century.
Roquentin in a Normandy town discovers that existence is absurd, starting with a chestnut root.
Seven years in a Davos sanatorium arguing about Europe before 1914.
A Brahmin's son leaves the Buddha to find his own way, and finds it at a river.
A bookish narrator and a Cretan who dances; Kazantzakis on how to live.
Meursault shoots an Arab on a beach because of the sun; Camus in a hundred pages.
Oran quarantined, Dr Rieux at work; Camus's novel of the Occupation and every epidemic since.
Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, until it is not; cultivate your garden.
A spiteful clerk in a Petersburg basement argues with everyone; the first existentialist novel.
Two years in a cabin by a pond; Thoreau on living deliberately.
Three brothers, a murdered father and the Grand Inquisitor; Dostoevsky's last novel.
A robot solves puzzles in Greek ruins while a voice asks what it is; Croteam's philosophy.
Read Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, exploring themes of the Ubermensch and eternal recurrence.
Read the Tripitaka (Pali Canon), the foundational scriptures of Theravada Buddhism
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