Question for experienced readers. A "smart" novel?

[deltakid]

Hi there!
(Please jump to the question in bold if you don't want to read why I ask)

Reading is not only my pleasure but also my remedy. I have onset insomnia, that means I sometimes have a hard time stopping to think and can't fall asleep (like right now).

Reading fantasy books has helped me a lot and usually after a few pages I get tired and can sleep. I started this about 3 years ago (before I didn't read much) but somehow I feel like wasting a lot of time (and I got a bit bored with fantasy).

I want to broaden my horizon and I would also love to learn something while reading in the evening.

I thought autobiographies could work in this matter.

I tried Richard Bransons autobiography but it was not a very interesting read. I have to admit I also didn't check out many other autobiographies.

The ideal book would have an interesting storyline and some bits and pieces of real world information. I would love to learn from other people's experiences or learn about psychology or philosophical ideas. I would love to gather more "wisdom" while still reading a book that is easy to read so I can still read it in the evening and I don't have to think too much.

I hope maybe some of you who are more experienced readers could offer some advice.


Can you recommend books that are easy to read, have a storyline and offer real world wisdom / experiences as you would usually find in non fiction books?


What genres of literature might be worth checking out?

Any ideas would be great!

p.s. I loved all the Steven Erikson Malazan books and the Prince of Nothing Trilogy (sorry just read fantasy so far).

[Rores28]

Well those aren't demanding criteria... :)

I think what you are asking is are there books that are written in relatively simple prose that don't try to be abstruse but still have a deep meaning... so they are difficult in content but not in execution... at least that is how I will assume you are asking the question in my answering of it.

I think Animal Farm by George Orwell might be the perfect book for this. Good themes about power and government but told allegorically and with what I consider to be a very compelling story.

I think 1984 by Orwell would be good as well.

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse is pretty cool... lots of real world insights but also insights into eastern philosophy which most of us from the west are not very familiar with.

The Stranger by Albert Camus... completely straightforward prose and story but with alot to think about as far as character motivation etc...

I think another great person is Kurt Vonnegut... very simple prose and often blatant explanations of his stands on things but there is deeper stuff too. Slaughterhouse five is historical fiction sorta and is very good, and Breakfast of Champions is hilarious.

I think my top two recommendations there are Animal Farm and Slaughterhouse Five.

Also for insomnia have you ever tried taking Magnesium before bed? I take 50 - 100% Magnesium Glycinate 30 mins before bed and this helps greatly with insomnia. It has a drowsying effect that kicks in in about 30 minutes and also should help you sleep more soundly. There is allegedly a link between insomnia and magnesium levels... it might be something to try especially if you have other commonly associated "symptoms" of low mag... like anxiety or OCD.

[David Lurie]

- Lenin's tomb by David Remnick - well written and interesting book about the Soviet Union.
- how to become a millionaire? try Titan by Ron Chernow - it's about J.D. Rockefeller.
Then you could try the Penguin lives series, brief autobiographies - around 170 pages - written by esteemed authors who know very well the characters they have to deal with.

[Ailill]

Here is a list of books that might be good for this


Bell Jar by: Sylvia Plath
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the adventures of Tom Swayer by: Mark Twain
Cat’s Cradle By: Kurt Vonnegut
A Room of One's Own by: Virginia Woolf
The Death of Ivan Ilyich By: Leo Tolstoy ( I would have suggested War and Peace, but it is really long and some find it very dry. It all depends on your taste)
Russian Folk Tales by: Alexsandr Afanasev (you would be surprised on some lessons you can learn from folk tales, plus you can pick it up and put it down at anytime. All the tales do have a story line.)


I do hope you find some of these worth reading... I have read them all countless times at night when I can't sleep.

[keilj]

Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis has some good insight into what it is like to be a medical doctor

In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck gives some really good insight into the California farming strikes/early labor movements

plus both of these books are really good works of fiction - very good stories in their own right

[OrphanPip]

Haha, of all recommendations in this thread, I'm pretty surprised by A Room of One's Own. It's a foundational text in feminism, and wonderfully written, but I'm not sure that a book length essay is what the OP was looking for.

You'll probably end up reading Orwell in high school eventually, if you haven't already. I'd second the recommendation of The Stranger by Camus.

[Ailill]

Haha, of all recommendations in this thread, I'm pretty surprised by A Room of One's Own. It's a foundational text in feminism, and wonderfully written, but I'm not sure that a book length essay is what the OP was looking for.


Well I was just putting it out there... Who knows it might be something (s)he might want to read. It was stated that (s)he was looking for something informative to read. :smile5: I suppose for someone who suffers from insomnia it is a bit short.

[deltakid]

Thanks for the suggestions so far! I'm German so we were reading Goethe and other German writers in school. I live in Thailand now since a few years and read English books (studied in England and Australia so reading English isn't a problem).

[PeterL]

I would suggest social science fiction and satire, but it also depends on what sort of " real world wisdom" you are interested in. There is wisdom in a wide variety of literature, because literature has been a teaching tool since its inception. I have also found " real world wisdom" in some fantasy and in some historical novels. If you are interested in the history of the British Empire in the 19th century, then the Flashman series is for you. If you want to think about how people interact with the world, then you ,ight find the works of G. C. Edmondson useful.

[deltakid]

Hi Peter,
I'm really interested in psychology and sociology. I would love to read an interesting story and learn more what makes us humans act like we do.

I do read a lot of cognitive psychology books throughout the day at the moment but this is nothing for falling asleep :)

[PeterL]

Hi Peter,
I'm really interested in psychology and sociology. I would love to read an interesting story and learn more what makes us humans act like we do.

I do read a lot of cognitive psychology books throughout the day at the moment but this is nothing for falling asleep :)

I strongly suggest The Ship That Sailed the Timestream by G.C. Edmondson. I love it, and it is about how minds interact with the universe. You might find fantasy interesting, especially books written by witches and such. Katherine Kurtz is a noted practitioner of magic and a writer of fantasy. Magical is one perspective on the interaction between people and things. Fritz Leiber also wrote some things that might interest you, especially Conjure Wife. Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan might be interesting; you might try reading all of Vonnegut's books.

And Umberto Eco, he is the world's foremost semioticist, but he most recent novel is about how memories create the personality. It's a joy to read, but I don't think that it reached a resolution.

[Remedy]

Well, Angels and Demons is a pretty smart book, its a real eye opener and it makes you understand a few things that you probably didn't. I dont know if its a difficult read but I personally have a hard time finding the right book to read but this one was pretty easy. :D

[mona amon]

I don't know if this meets all your criteria, but it's definitely a 'smart novel', an easy read, and very entertaining. The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch. I've got just a few pages left and I think it's brilliant. :thumbsup:

[oshima]

The first thing that came to mind was Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. The prose is simultaneously elegant, simple, and realistic. Enormously compelling, dialog seethes with tension and the characters have a visceral believability and psychological depth. Primarily it is about what it means to have an ideal life in modern society (though it takes place in the 50's, it's quite relevant today) If you don't feel like reading it, though, I would say this is one of the few instances where the movie they made recently is almost, possibly as, good as the novel.

[goatlips]

The novels of Anthony Trollope are plot driven and tell much about life and thought in the nineteenth century.

[lyni]

I will also recommend Umberto Eco.
and add Terry Pratchett. his novels are fantasy but they are humorous and satire about us as humans and our beliefs.

Jean Paul Sartre is also a good read.

good luck with finding something you like.
lyn

[Lord Macbeth]

A trio of suggestions:

-Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. A pretty accessible, easy-to-read book that definitely has some down-to-earth wisdom and ideas, and if you are willing to apply literary or philosophical theory to it, it contains even more. A book that was a masterpiece when I first read it and, like so much of the best literature, only gets better with every subsequent reading.

-Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Anonymous. I am a HUGE fan of the Arthurian Legend, in fact after Shakespeare and the plays and treatises of the Existential philosophers--Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Stoppard...Fear and Trembling, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Being and Nothingness, The Fall, Waiting For Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, etc.--Arthur's Legend is my favorite literary topic, and this epic poem is one of the reasons why. Sir Gawain is by far my favorite knight and the one I most identified with--when I was choosing a name it was between a Shakespeare character, Sherlock Holmes and Gawain, and after I saw "Hamlet" wasn't available I nearly went with Gawain, actually--and this poem shows not only his greatest adventure, but really one of the Top Five stories of the Arthur Legend in literature, the other four I'd tentatively name the Sword in the Stone story, Tristan and Isolde, The Vulgate Cycle (aka "The Quest for the Holy Grail") and The Fall of Camelot, which essentially is from Lancelot and Guinevere to Sir Mordred's plots to the greatest knights in the Legend, Lancelot and Gawain dueling one another after Lancelot accidentally kills Gawain's borthers Gareth and Gaheris, with Gawain dying, and finally the tragic Battle of Camlaan where everyone dies as the Knights of the Round Table fight a bloody civil war and destroy each other and King Arthur falls. Those are ALL great stories, and those four can be found, and for the most part in the versions that are either best known or the "best" versions of those stories, in Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur. Gawain has two sides to him in the literature, and it's part of why he's one of the two best and most important knights alongside Lancelot--Gawain is always a great champion but a flawed person, and whichever trait is stressed in the work dictates how Gawain is portrayed and how he acts; in Mallory it's generally the "flawed" aspect that's conveyed, and so we wind up with a much grimmer view of Gawain, as he's constantly compared to other knights, and usually unfavorably, so while he does have his moments of heroism he is also, to a great extent, Mallory's way of showing what a knight or a man SHOULDN'T BE. In THIS work, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we get the opposite, we get Gawain as a model of humanity that's praiseworthy, but what's great and allows the work to really retain its legacy as not only one of the best Arthurian texts but one of the best Medevial literary works period is the fact that while Gawain is shown victorious in the end and praiseworthy he retains that "flawed" aspect of his character. I won't tell you how or why, as to give too much away spoils a great twist ending, but suffice it to say Gawain goes from what looks like bad to worse to seemingly a disgraceful end to his knightly career to a sort of moral victory BECAUSE of his flaws that allow him to become recognized as one of the greatest knights in Arthur's Court. No knight, not even Lancelot, appears in more stories in the Legend than Sir Gawain, son he's a great character to get acquainted with, and the story itself has some of the most elegant language of its period and has within it themes and morals that strike at the core of the human experience.

-Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare. This wouldn't be one of my posts without the mention of the Bard, and here is one of my favorite comedies, one that is highly accessible and carries with it some interesting ideas. Most people are familiar with at least the basic ideas and plot of Romeo and Juliet and the million knockoffs that have followed, and so what makes THIS work great...well, suffice it to say that if you found Romeo and Juliet a bit to idealistic and foolish in their mannerisms and their idea of "love" to be unrealistic--Beatrice and Benedict agree with you. And they say so. Repeatedly. While bickering. But do THEY love each other? What do they think about love? "The world must be peopled!" ;) OK, besides THAT...quite a few interesting ideas on love here, especially if you've ever found Romeo and Juliet a bit too flowery, here's a much more modern couple, a hilarious play that flies by (and has a "Shakespeare Retold" version by the BBC on YouTube with mostly-modern language, so if you really don't want to deal with Shakespeare's Elizabethan words...you make me sad, but this modern version is great and doesn't lose anything plot-wise for the translation) and I'd say is FAR better than Romeo and Juliet's tragedy--definitely worth a read or, as I believe plays should always be seen first and then read if possible (being a theatre person) a watch.