In terms of being easy to read, entertaining and though-provoking you can’t go too far wrong with 1984, Animal Farm or any Pratchett (but especially mid-period city watch)
Here’s a few I really enjoyed reading - books I think have ‘profound’ themes but, importantly, are also fun reads:
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The Man Who Was Thursday by Chesterton;
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The Master and Margarita by Bugalikov;
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Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Calvino.
I also loved Borges’ short stories, which have already been mentioned.
The former two deal with religious themes, but not in a cheap and easy way (I can say without spoiling anything that The Master and Margarita on its surface deals with the mayhem that ensues when Satan makes a personal appearance in Stalin’s Russia, with hilarious and tragic consequences; there are subtexts at work, of course!).
I’m a big fan of Martin Amis. I think Money might be his best. Try The Information. That was really good too.
I thought as simple as Animal Farm is, it is still profound.
It is short and simple but The Razor’s Edge stuck me as profound.
What about, I don’t know, Brideshead Revisited or something like that that’s about what makes people happy and how some people aren’t happy and why?
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, mmm, no.
The Eden Express, perhaps? It’s Mark Vonnegut’s story of how he went insane and came back from insanity. Mark is the son of Kurt.
I agree with the Siddhartha suggestion, by Hesse. I would maybe add something by Camus - The Stranger or The Plague have a decent amount to think about, IMO, yet still work as stories.
Kafka is a solid suggestions as well.
Umberto Eco tends to be good for deep reads.
The Name of the Rose
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Island of the Day Before
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
If you like Steinbeck, there’s lots of stuff he wrote they don’t assign in high school. Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Cannery Row, Wayward Bus…
And you might well like Hemingway too - For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms are usually not high school fare either.
Crime and Punishment can be life-changing, and is the most accessible of Dostoevsky’s works that I’ve read.
Is Dickens profound? I don’t know what you mean by profound.
Willa Cather’s stuff moves me, and reminds me of Steinbeck in being very American, very unaffected prose. My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop are my favorites.
Just checked my goodreads favorites shelf.
Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is short, simple and profound.
All Quiet on the Western Front. Profound. Easily digestable.
Middlemarch by George Eliot. Long as shit, but profound.
Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera - hot, sexy, profound.
Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
The Republic by Plato
Common Sense by Thomas Paine
The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Cosmos by Carl Sagan
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Synergetics by Buckminster Fuller
Aesop’s Fables
+1
How about Gilead? It’s about aging, religion, fathers and sons…
Seconded, and will add O Pioneers!. I’ve never thought of her work as profound, but in retrospect it has affected my very deeply.
Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind may fit here, too. One may call it profound in its simplicity.
Second vote for Catch 22 and Dostoevsky, although the one I liked was Brothers Karamazov. I’ve recently been reading a lot of Pratchett, which was suggested up thread. There’s a fair bit of earthy wisdom thrown around as satire, but I’ll bet even he would never want “profound” used to describe his books.
And The Professor’s House.
Willa rocks.
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon - about family, identity, crime, the Internet, love, vengeance, and the lies too many tell even their loved ones. Good stuff.
Another Kurt Vonnegut suggestion: Galapagos. Took my breath away.
Pretty Birds by Mark Simon captured the War of the Balkans quite movingly. It shifts with the seventeen year old protagonist who is a high school student one month, a sniper the next.
The movie Children of Men was done really well, but the book by P.D. James is also worth reading. It gives a fascinating insight to what a world without children would be like.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sachs. Sachs writes about patients with mental anomalies; the title refers to a man who has no ability to recognize faces. Sachs suggests to his wife that she wear a piece of clothing (like a hat) so he can recognize her.
Voltaire’s Candide. A very short, quite hilarious, incredibly biting satire written as a response to the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, and as a criticism of Leibniz’s then quite popular idea that despite all the apparent evils of the world, this is the best of all possible ones. If you’re not already familiar with it, read the bit of its wiki on its historical background before you start on the novella proper for an enhanced experience.