Books like The Little Prince

The short answer: look for stories that see the world through somebody who has not yet learned to stop noticing. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Alchemist, The Prophet, Siddhartha and, newer and more mythic, SalsSky: The Chosen One all share something of it.

The Little Prince is a book written for children that adults keep giving to each other. A pilot is stranded in the desert. A small visitor appears from a tiny planet, where he has left behind a single rose he loved and did not understand. On his way to Earth he has met grown-ups who count, rule, drink and boast, each trapped in something that does not matter. And on Earth a fox teaches him the book's most loved lesson: that what makes something precious is the time you have given it, and that the most important things cannot be seen with the eyes.

The books that feel like it share that double vision: simple on the surface, and underneath, a question about how you are spending your attention.

The fables

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is the closest in size and in sincerity, a gull who loves flying more than food and pays for it. The Alchemist is the closest in shape, a shepherd's journey toward a treasure that is not where he thought. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran has no story at all, only a man answering a city's questions about love, work, joy and sorrow, but it has the same quiet tone of somebody telling you something true and leaving it with you.

The deeper water

Siddhartha is what you read when the Little Prince has made you ask bigger questions. It is a whole life spent learning that wisdom cannot be passed on, only found. Life of Pi shares Saint-Exupéry's love of a strange, true-feeling story told by a survivor, and ends by asking which version of a story you would rather believe.

Where SalsSky fits

SalsSky: The Chosen One is a finished mythic novel in seven chapters, set in a harbour city long before history. It is not a children's book. But one of its earliest scenes is pure Little Prince: in The Weight of an Ant, the teacher, Sophus, crouches by a tide pool and lifts a drowning ant onto dry stone, a thing so small nobody else would have noticed it. Then he turns to Sals and asks him about something else entirely:

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

That is the fox's lesson in another key. What you give your attention to is what you love, and most of us spend ours chasing.

Honestly, SalsSky is much longer than the Little Prince, darker, and full of a world that the fable leaves out: a sea that comes over a city, a hunt, grief. It is also new and little known. Chapter One is free on salssky.com, about five minutes a scene.

How to read any of these as an adult

Read them out loud, or slowly enough that you could. Notice the sentence you would underline. Then ask the question the Little Prince keeps asking the grown-ups: is the thing you are so busy with the thing that matters to you?

A question to carry

What is your rose: the one thing you have given so much time to that it has become yours?