While there are plenty of John Grisham novels we can enjoy for their plot or enlightening biographies, I am looking for a fiction book that is as profound as they come. I’ve read Slaughterhouse-Five, 1984, Gatsby, all those fun high school novels, but I haven’t reached out much more than that.
It probably depends on what you value in life. I find Proust plus profond but I’m a rambler and muller-overer. I also see a lot in Howard’s End, The Bluest Eye, Life Of Pi, A Pattern Language, and The Golden Bough. Not that those are all my favorite books to be reading, but I find the most value in their lessons.
I’ll say this for sure: I didn’t really enjoy Life of Pi. I don’t know what that means to you guys, but I just know I didn’t enjoy it or his mulling over God stuff.
I also don’t exactly love straight religious satire stuff. I haven’t gotten into Cat’s Cradle yet because most of the fake religion/making fun of religion satire thing is a lot of, “I get it already, religion is dumb.” to me. If Cat’s Cradle is way more profound than that, please let me know and I’ll go pick it up.
I also loved The Stranger, Asimov’s work, and Steinbeck’s work. Man Who Folded Himself was cool, too. Don’t know if any of this makes sense. Just trying to give you a picture of what I like, I guess.
So you’re only looking for profound books that you’d enjoy? If you want something really challenging, you may not enjoy it.
Well just go for it, man. Tell me something! 
Here is a GoodReads link for “deep fiction” novels.
I’ve enjoyed the novels of Hermann Hesse. Steppenwolf and Siddhartha were my favorites.
Russian novels are excellent for depth. You can’t do much better than Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The first paints a broad portrait of the human condition and the second examines one messed-up human in incredible detail.
How about some Kafka? Check out The Trial.
Apparently deep is a relative term on that site. That list includes several “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books.
Cat’s Cradle is scarcely about making fun of religion at all. I suppose it does do that, but the book is very far from being a one-dimensional satire of religion. I would recommend it. I think it is better than Slaughterhouse 5.
In general, though, one man’s profound is going to be another’s dumb and clichéd, and yet another’s pretentious and/or incomprehensible. It depends on you much more than on the book. You just need to try stuff and see. After a bit you will get some sense of what you like, and can look into what is liked by other people who like the sort of stuff that you like.
That said, I am going to suggest Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; but is it right for you? Who knows. I am just guessing about where you might be at.
I’m not very literary, and don’t know about “profound” but will opinionate anyway. :dubious:
The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway and Notes from Underground by Dostoyevsky are among my very favorites, yet I find many longer novels – especially Dostoyevsky’s – too tedious.
I’ve read two novels by Martin Amis: Time’s Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence many years ago and Money: A Suicide Note recently. Next time I’m in a bookstore I’m heading straight to Amis.
This list might be worth browsing, though I confess I disliked most of the listed books which I read.
*Contact *by Carl Sagan
Jorge Luis Borges - any of his short stories (he doesn’t have any novels, just short stories and some non-fiction).
What kind of stuff does he write about?
Borges writes a lot about the intersection of reality and fiction or reality and dreams/other things “unreal”. One of his most famous stories is The Library of Babel which concerns a library with everything ever written and everything that ever could be written…but the works are uncataloged and essential unfindable. You can see the issues this would raise.
Anyway, I find his stuff profound in a kind of mind-bending way, but there are lots of different things people mean by profound. If you’re at all interested, most of the stories are very short so if you read a couple and dislike them, you’re not out the time it would take to read Proust or Joyce or Kant or something.
You might disagree with her ideas or dislike her style, but Ayn Rand does give you plenty to think about- Anthem, The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged (I have not yet read We The Living).
C.S. Lewis- Till We Have Faces, a retelling of Psyche & Eros
That Hideous Strength- the 3rd in the Space Trilogy, it serves as a stand alone for me, may not for others
The Screwtape Letters & The Great Divorce- heavily Christian looks at the Demonic & the Afterlife
Brave New World?
I enjoy Borges. One of the oddest experiences of my life occured when I read a collection of his short stories, then went back and read the preface, which was some 20 pages long, that described his last days, his death, his funeral procession, etc. A few weeks later I turned on the TV and he was being interviewed on the impact of Argentina’s literature in the U.S. I checked the book, and the preface was gone. It occured to me that this is just the kind of thing that Borges writes about, and that he’d enjoy it. He has since died, but I keep checking to make sure. (And, yes, I realize I must have imagined the preface.)
Ursula LeGuin - The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness.
My brother is a big fan of Montaigne.
How old are you? No big deal; it just helps dial things in.
- Read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and also some of Borges’ stories.
- If you are in your late teens or early 20’s, try The Magus by John Fowles, the updated version. A guy graduates from college, not feeling great about himself, and ends up taking a teaching position on a small Greek island. There he encounters a weird set of things that lead him to believe he has become part of a big game being led by a rich man who lives on the island. Cool, weird and potentially profound things ensue. ETA: there is a “thriller” aspect of the mystery which makes it a fun read, but it really is about bigger questions in life.
- Also if you are in your late teens or early 20’s, I strongly recommend The Red and the Black by Stendhal - a young man is trying to get out of his small French village but is trapped by expectations - it is set a couple of hundred years ago but will feel very familiar.
Finally, I would suggest Catch-22 - profoundly funny, but also a profoundly absurb look at war and the human condition.
Oh, and yeah, Montaigne isn’t fiction - he wrote essays on stuff that was on his mind, which tended to ultimately morph into him writing about his mind and the human condition in general. Profound stuff, indeed.
My $.02