Books like Siddhartha

The short answer: look for stories where the hero is not taught the truth but has to live into it. That is what Siddhartha does, and only a handful of books do it as well: Hesse's own Demian and Narcissus and Goldmund, Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and, newer and darker, SalsSky: The Chosen One.

People who love Siddhartha rarely love it for its plot. They love it for one refusal at its centre. Siddhartha meets the Buddha, recognises him as awakened, and still walks away, because what the Buddha found cannot be handed over in a teaching. It has to be found again, by each person, in their own life. Everything after that, the years among the ascetics, the years of money and love in the city, the years beside the river, is the long proof that he was right.

So the question is not which books share its setting. It is which books share that refusal.

Hesse's own neighbours

If Siddhartha moved you, start with Hesse himself. Demian is the same search, set in a German boyhood, and it is stranger and more urgent: a young man learning that the world he was raised in is only half of the world. Narcissus and Goldmund splits the search in two, a monk who stays and an artist who wanders, and lets you decide which life you would have chosen. Steppenwolf is the hardest of the three and the least gentle; read it when you are ready to be argued with.

The fables

The Alchemist is the book most people reach for next, and for good reason: a young man, a journey, signs along the way, and a treasure that turns out to be about the journey itself. It is simpler than Siddhartha and warmer, and some readers find it too simple. Jonathan Livingston Seagull is shorter still, a fable about a gull who wants to fly for its own sake and is cast out for it. Both share Hesse's conviction that the inner life has a direction, and that following it costs you something.

The river, in other forms

The most remembered part of Siddhartha is the river: the ferryman who has learned everything he knows by listening to it, and Siddhartha learning, at last, to listen too. Books that keep that quality tend to slow you down rather than speed you up. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is one. The Old Man and the Sea is another, in its own hard way: a man, the water, and what he refuses to give up.

Where SalsSky fits

SalsSky: The Chosen One is a finished mythic novel in seven chapters, set long before history in a harbour city called San Juan. Its hero, Sals, is a sea master with a teacher of his own, Sophus, who, like Hesse's ferryman, will not simply tell him things. In The Weight of an Ant, early in the first chapter, the teacher's question is the kind Siddhartha spends his whole life learning to ask:

“Did you notice it, or did you chase it?”

That is the closest thing SalsSky has to Siddhartha's river. Sals is a man of action in a city that rewards action, and the book keeps stopping him: with a teacher who lifts a drowning ant out of a tide pool, with the sea, with a question he cannot answer quickly.

It is different in honest ways. SalsSky is longer, darker and more mythic than Siddhartha: there is a sea that comes over a city, there are creatures, there is a hunt. Hesse's book is calm from its first page; SalsSky earns its calm. And SalsSky is new and little known, without a century of readers behind it. You can read Chapter One free on salssky.com, about five minutes a scene, and decide for yourself.

How to read any of them

Slowly, and with something to write on. These are not books you finish so much as books you stop inside. When a sentence stops you, keep it, and ask what it is saying about your life rather than about the character's. That is the whole method Siddhartha teaches, and it works on every book on this list.

A question to carry

If you were Siddhartha, standing in front of somebody who had already found what you were looking for, would you stay and be taught, or walk away and find it yourself?