A book that is a page turner, where after every chapter I cannot wait to read the next. It needs to have beautiful almost poetic prose, smooth like butter on toast yet unassuming and not overly ornamental, just direct and gorgeous. I want it to be so profound I am not the same person after I finish it, my life can hence be divided into too eras, "before" and "after" I read that masterpiece.
I want it to be melancholy to the point of inducing fits of sobbing but not be despair porn. That is: bittersweet, hopeful , with a sense of learning a hidden life lesson and feeling closure like no other, like nothing I ever felt.
I need it to invade my soul and become part of my DNA. I need it to help me make sense of my life and cure depression. Or maybe induce depression only to cure it in a blaze of incomprehensible transcendence.
I need it to be a doorstop of a book so I can live in it for a long time , and even then whats between the lines, whats not on the page, I want also to be so vast I day dream about it for the rest of my life.
I want the singular, holy grail, most divinely perfect book ever authored by a human mind, or maybe arguably inspired from beyond.
I need to almost have the urge to abandon all civilization after I finish with my copy of said book and walk into the wilderness, fully content, peace at last.
What book would that be ?
by HilbertInnerSpace
7 Comments
*Red star over the third world* by Vijay Prashad fits your first two paragraphs. I don’t know of any book that matches the rest.
I feel like what you’re looking for is going to be either Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. *War and Peace* or *Anna Karenina* by Tolstoy, *Crime and Punishment* or *The Brothers Karamazov* by Dostoevsky.
If you weren’t looking for a doorstop, I’d argue you might be interested in Virginia Woolf as well, but her books are fairly short in length. *To the Lighthouse* fits most of your post except for the doorstop part.
A modern-day book that was like this for me was The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd. It’s not particularly long but I decided to take several months to finish it and I’m glad I did. It’s a part of my soul now.
The secret history by Donna Tartt
The Legends and Myths of Hawai’i by David Kalākaua.
Wuthering Heights is it!
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Flight Behavior
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
The Book Thief
Never Let Me Go
Flowers for Algernon
The Poisonwood Bible