You don’t have to read. Your life is your blank page, scribble as you like. But in our experience, it’s still the best way to begin understanding the complicated, ever-curious thoughts that come into our own minds. To learn that living is living and we’re all going to die. And we don’t mean that to sound morose. We mean it to sound comforting.

We’ve seen inside the backpacks of our generation and the reading material inside them could use a pep talk. Below we’ve suggested five books that have illuminated the black hole of life on more than a few occasions (albeit often with just a new look into that same black hole), but they’ve also shown that maybe we shouldn’t be looking for light, but rather just remembering to enjoy the dark. Read a few of these books and I think you’ll start to see what we mean…

1.) The Stranger by Albert Camus

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.” —from The Stranger

For all intents and purposes, this book is the perfect introduction into the absurdity of existentialism in the modern condition. A man’s mother dies, he then shoots a stranger just because. His subsequent execution is his only salvation. But holy shit there is so much more to it than that. In my experience, this book is the perfect kindling for igniting a bonfire of mind-fucks on yourself that is existentialism and should be your introduction to the thought process that will both challenge and enlighten you.

2.) The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” —from The Sheltering Sky

If you’re one for the road, you’ll enjoy this one. Set in the wild land of post war Tangier, a couple and a travel companion make their way across the hostile regions of Northern Africa as “travelers not tourists” and the remoteness, the isolation, the heat, the earth, the desert, the vast sky and the unruly world that makes it up have a drastic effect upon the characters. If you think you’d like to sip tea in the remote regions of North Africa, don’t put the kettle on before reading this. Simply a perfect novel for a dusty backpack.

3.) An American Dream by Norman Mailer

“A fire had begun to spread in me. It was burning now in my stomach and my lungs were dry as old leaves, my heart had a herded pressure which gave promise to explode.” —from An American Dream

This is the kind of book that has the ability to be more audacious than your iPhone and could actually make you forget you have one. It is thrilling and sexy and dark and fucked up. But at its core it is about the complicated thinking that revolved around society, freedom and madness in an absurd world. This is why we read.

4.) The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

“I was supposed to be having the time of my life.” —from The Bell Jar

Almost 12 years ago I went on a surf trip with Dane Reynolds and he pulled this book out. I was an English literature major at the time, and still hadn’t had it assigned. But if Dane was reading it, something had to be going on. After reading it, I can say it’s truly as if the beautiful and lush underwater swaying of a Beach House song collaborated with lyrics from the Misfits. Dark. Brooding. And real. It is a book that defines the color purple. It was a pleasant surprise and a book that continues to fascinate and intrigue.

5.) The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

“What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.” —from The Myth of Sisyphus

This book nearly did me in. For the first 3 quarters I turned into an odd man saying, “Who cares, we’re all just going to die.” But something happens by the end that leaves a man as hopeful about existence as a man emerging from the tube. Based around the Greek myth of Sisyphus — who long-story-short is sentenced to rolling a ball up a hill his entire life (eternity), only to have it fall back to the ground before his goal. Albert Camus uses this as a metaphor for humanity…which sounds thoroughly depressing, until you picture, as Camus suggests, Sisyphus as happy. Have a crack at this one, it’s good reading.

A quote from the master: 

“It wasn’t the New World that mattered…Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It’s life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky