Nihilistic Books and Depressive Reading Recommendations

Goodreads 4.0

Animal Farm

George Orwell

CN: 4.0

Animal Farm

George Orwell

A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress,...

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Goodreads 4.0

The Fall

Albert Camus

CN: 4.4

The Fall

Albert Camus

Jean-Baptiste Clamence is a soul in turmoil. Over several drunken nights in an Amsterdam bar, he regales a chance acquaintance with his story. From th...

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Goodreads 4.0

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Thomas Ligotti

CN: 4.1

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Thomas Ligotti

In Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction outing, an examination of the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life through an insightful, unsparing argument that...

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Goodreads 4.0

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

CN: 4.1

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under -- maybe f...

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Goodreads 3.9

No Longer Human

Osamu Dazai

CN: 4.3

No Longer Human

Osamu Dazai

Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, this leading postwar Japanese writer's second novel, tells the poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is cau...

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Goodreads 4.1

Steppenwolf

Hermann Hesse

CN: 4.1

Steppenwolf

Hermann Hesse

Steppenwolf is a poetical self-portrait of a man who felt himself to be half-human and half-wolf. This Faust-like and magical story is evidence of Hes...

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Goodreads 3.8

Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett

CN: 4.0

Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett

The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men simply waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inha...

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Goodreads 4.1

The Death of Ivan Ilych

Leo Tolstoy

CN: 4.6

The Death of Ivan Ilych

Leo Tolstoy

Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a h...

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Goodreads 4.0

The Stranger

Albert Camus

CN: 4.6

The Stranger

Albert Camus

n ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on a sundrenched Algerian beach, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced wi...

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Goodreads 3.9

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka

CN: 4.5

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it...

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Goodreads 3.9

Buried Alive

Sadegh Hedayat

CN: 5.0

Buried Alive

Sadegh Hedayat

Buried Alive is told in the first person by a young writer who is sick in bed in Paris. He talks about his weakness, his thoughts of ending his life,...

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Goodreads 4.2

The Tartar Steppe

Dino Buzzati

CN: 4.5

The Tartar Steppe

Dino Buzzati

Often likened to Kafka's The Castle, The Tartar Steppe is both a scathing critique of military life and a meditation on the human thirst for glory. It...

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Goodreads 4.0

The Sunset Limited

Cormac McCarthy

CN: 4.7

The Sunset Limited

Cormac McCarthy

In that small apartment, Black and White, as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the orig...

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Goodreads 4.4

Stoner

John Williams

CN: 4.6

Stoner

John Williams

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy,...

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Goodreads 3.9

Nausea

Jean-Paul Sartre

CN: 4.8

Nausea

Jean-Paul Sartre

Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogu...

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Goodreads 4.2

Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoevsky

CN: 4.6

Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Its nameless hero is a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis there is a search for the true and the good in a world of relat...

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Goodreads 4.0

Things: A Story of the Sixties

Georges Perec

CN: 4.5

Things: A Story of the Sixties

Georges Perec

Jerome and Sylvie, the young, upwardly mobile couple in Things, lust for the good life. "They wanted life's enjoyment, but all around them enjoyment w...

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Goodreads 4.0

A Man Asleep

Georges Perec

CN: 4.9

A Man Asleep

Georges Perec

a 1967 novel by the French writer Georges Perec. It uses a second-person narrative, and follows a 25-year-old student, who one day decides to be indif...

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