Happiness and Contemplation
10 best books like Happiness and Contemplation (Josef Pieper): The Raven, Her Fearful Symmetry, The Brothers Karamazov, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, The Doors of Perception, Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings, The Snow Child, The Rules Do Not Apply, Helena, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
| Author | Edgar Allan Poe |
| ISBN | 0486290727 |
In Gustave Doré, one of the most prolific and successful book illustrators of the late 19h century, Edgar Allan Poe's renowned poem The Raven found perhaps its most perfect artistic interpreter. Doré's dreamlike, otherworldly style, tinged with melancholy, seems ideally matched to the bleak...
| Author | Audrey Niffenegger |
| ISBN | 0224085611 |
Six years after the phenomenal success of The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger has returned with a spectacularly compelling and haunting second novel set in and around Highgate Cemetery in London.
When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces,...
| Author | Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
| ISBN | 0374528373 |
The Brothers Karamasov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the “wicked and sentimental” Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons―the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and...
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
| Author | Anne Fadiman |
| ISBN | 0374525641 |
Lia Lee was born in 1982 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy. By 1988 she was living at home but was brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, over-medication, and culture clash: "What the doctors viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as...
The Doors of Perception is a philosophical essay, released as a book, by Aldous Huxley. First published in 1954, it details his experiences when taking mescaline. The book takes the form of Huxley's recollection of a mescaline trip that took place over the course of an afternoon in May 1953. The book...
Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings
| Author | Diana Pavlac Glyer |
| ISBN | 1606352768 |
Copy provided by Kent State University Press.
In The Company They Keep, Diana Pavlac Glyer established herself among the foremost Inklings scholars. It’s one of those rarities, a deeply academic book that is also immensely readable.
That book proved that the Inklings really...
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build...
| Author | Ariel Levy |
| ISBN | 0812996933 |
When thirty-eight-year-old New Yorker writer Ariel Levy left for a reporting trip to Mongolia in 2012, she was pregnant, married, financially secure, and successful on her own terms. A month later, none of that was true.
Levy picks you up and hurls you through the story of how she built an unconventional...
“In Helena, the play of words and the fireworks, the exquisite descriptions of landscapes, and even the finished portraits of the heroine, her husband, and her son, are always subordinate to the author’s broad vision of the mixed anguish and hope with which the world of Constantine’s time...
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
| Author | C.S. Lewis |
| ISBN | 0156027666 |
"We want to know not how we should pray if we were perfect but how we should pray being as we now are."
What are we doing when we pray? What is at the heart of this most intimate conversation, the dialogue between a person and God? How does prayer—its form, its regularity, its content, its insistence—shape...
In this dark and compelling short novel, Fyodor Dostoevsky tells the story of Alexey Ivanovitch, a young tutor working in the household of an imperious Russian general. Alexey tries to break through the wall of the established order in Russia, but instead becomes mired in the endless downward spiral...
Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux
| Author | Thérèse de Lisieux |
| ISBN | 0935216588 |
I can't remember the first time I read this but I think it was in high school. Dear St. Thérèse was my Confirmation saint so I wanted to read her autobiography. I remember being blown away by her simple and yet powerful approach to sanctity. It IS the Gospel -- so gentle, humble, meek and Christian -- and...
Father and I Were Ranchers
| Author | Ralph Moody |
| ISBN | 0803281781 |
Ralph was eight years old in 1906 when his family moved from New Hampshire to a Colorado ranch. Through his eyes, the pleasures and perils of ranching in the early twentieth century are experienced... auctions and roundups, family picnics, irrigation wars, tornadoes and wind storms all give authentic...
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
| Author | Nicholas Carr |
| ISBN | 0393339750 |
“Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing...
A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18
| Author | Joseph Loconte |
| ISBN | 0718021762 |
The untold story of how the First World War shaped the lives, faith, and writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis
The First World War laid waste to a continent and permanently altered the political and religious landscape of the West. For a generation of men and women, it brought the end of innocence—and...
| Author | Nathan Englander |
| ISBN | 1524732753 |
The Pulitzer finalist delivers his best work yet--a brilliant, streamlined comic novel, reminiscent of early Philip Roth and of his own most masterful stories, about a son's failure to say Kaddish for his father
Larry is an atheist in a family of orthodox Memphis Jews. When his father dies,...
The Pilgrim's Regress is a book of allegorical fiction by C. S. Lewis. This 1933 novel was Lewis's first published work of prose fiction, and his third piece of work to be published. It charts the progress of a fictional character named John through a philosophical landscape in search of the Island of...
