BVBook Verdict

If you liked

Books like Makura no sōshi

Loved Makura no sōshi by Sei Shōnagon? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from essays, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.

10 books · ranked

  1. 1

    The Fire Next Time

    James Baldwin · 1963 · Essays

    Two searing essays on race, faith and America; as urgent now as when they were written.

  2. 2

    Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    Joan Didion · 1968 · Essays

    Sharp, cool essays on 1960s America; the book that set the standard for the personal essay.

  3. 3

    Roads to Freedom

    Bertrand Russell · 1918 · Essays

    THE attempt to conceive imaginatively a better ordering of human society than the destructive and cruel chaos in which mankind has hitherto existed is by no means modern: it is at least as old as Plat

  4. 4

    Prejudices

    H. L. Mencken · 1919 · Essays

    Mencken, with his acerbic wit and tongue planted permanently near if not in cheek, laments a world where some feel that all original criticism has been done. New ideas are old ideas with new vocabular

  5. 5

    Philosophical essays

    Bertrand Russell · 1910 · Essays

    "This collection was first published in 1917 in Great Britain."

  6. 6

    Painting as a pastime

    Winston S. Churchill · 1921 · Essays

    "'Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely' The perfect antidote to the depression that blighted his working life, Sir Winston Churchill took to painting with gusto following his ejection

  7. 7

    Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein

    György Lukács · 1923 · Essays

    History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (German: Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein – Studien über marxistische Dialektik) is a 1923 book by the Hungarian philosopher György Lukác

  8. 8

    Pluralistic Universe

    William James · 1908 · Essays

    Lectures on the advantages of using radical empiricism (pluralism) when trying to relate entities in the absolute to the absolute.

  9. 9

    SPIRITS REBELLIOUS

    Kahlil Gibran · 1908 · Essays

    "'Illustrations reproduced from original drawings by the author.'"

  10. 10

    Adventures in Contentment

    David Grayson · 1907 · Essays

    This, I am firmly convinced, is a strange world, as strange a one as I

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