Books like Jonathan Livingston Seagull

The short answer: read the fables about leaving the flock to find out what you are for. Richard Bach's own Illusions, Coelho's The Alchemist, Hesse's Siddhartha, Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, and, newer and longer, SalsSky: The Chosen One all sit close to it.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a very small book about a very large idea. A gull would rather practise flying than fight over scraps at the fishing boats. The flock calls this shameful and casts him out. Alone, he keeps practising, meets teachers who show him that the limits he assumed were never real, and finally goes back to teach the gulls who were cast out after him.

Read that way, it is a book about three things: the cost of wanting more than your world allows, the teachers who appear when you are ready, and the return. The best books like it have at least two of the three.

Richard Bach's other books

Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah is the obvious next step: a barnstorming pilot meets a man who claims to be a messiah and would rather not be. It is playful where the gull is earnest, and it asks the same question from the other side: what if the teacher does not want the job?

The classic fables

The Little Prince shares the gull's clarity and its sadness: a pilot down in the desert, a small visitor from another world, and a lesson about what matters that the grown-ups have forgotten. The Alchemist shares its shape, a young man, a calling, a journey that costs him the life he knew. Siddhartha is the deepest of these and the least comforting, a man who leaves every teacher to find the thing no teacher can give.

Longer journeys with the same spirit

If you loved the gull but wanted more of it, more world, more people, more at stake, look for novels where the climb takes a whole life. The Old Man and the Sea is short but carries that weight. Life of Pi puts its hero alone on the ocean and asks what story he will choose to believe about it.

Where SalsSky fits

SalsSky: The Chosen One is a finished mythic novel in seven chapters, about five minutes a scene. Its hero, Sals, is a sea master in a harbour city long before history, and like Jonathan he has a teacher who will not make it easy. The book is built as a climb, seven levels, Heart, Mind, Body and Soul at each one, and its first lesson is the gull's first lesson, said plainly in the book's second scene, The Fragrance of the Sun:

“Trust whatever stays clear when the fear shows up.”

It differs from Bach's book in honest ways. It is far longer, and it is not a fable: it has a city, a sea that comes over it, a hunt, grief and politics. Where the gull's story moves upward in clean arcs, Sals's moves through mud and water. And it is new, without the decades of readers Bach's book has. Chapter One is free on salssky.com, if you want to see whether it speaks to you.

What these books have in common

None of them tells you to be braver. They show somebody being afraid and going anyway, and let you notice where you are standing. That is why people reread them at different ages and find different books each time.

A question to carry

What would you practise, every day, if nobody you knew thought it mattered?