Classic novels and stories

War and Peace

“Cowen recommends reading War and Peace in full rather than in abridgment, and specifically recommends reading it more than once. He has described it as the best account in literature of how large historical forces interact with individual decision-making — and a corrective to any theory of history that over-weights individual agency.”Tyler Cowen

Siddhartha

“He wrote "I loved that book when I read it in college," recommending it in an AVC discussion.”Fred Wilson

The Trial

“Another of the novels he names as essential to how he sees bureaucracy and power.”David Heinemeier Hansson

Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Hurston's 1937 novel about Janie Crawford's search for self-determination has been named by Obama as a formative book. It treats a Black woman's inner life with a fullness that was rare in its time and remains a model for the kind of literary attention her own memoir attempts to pay to her younger self.”Michelle Obama

One Hundred Years of Solitude

“He called it "another amazing book" in his reading recommendations.”Fred Wilson

In Search of Lost Time

“Cowen has written that Proust rewards re-reading in a way few long works do. He is interested specifically in the passages on memory and perception — not the famous madeleine set-piece but the sustained philosophical argument about what it means to know another person or to understand your own past.”Tyler Cowen

1984

“One of the five novels DHH says he thinks about regularly.”David Heinemeier Hansson

“One of Cowen's most frequently cited novels. He has argued on the blog that Tolstoy's apparent digressions on farming, politics, and religion are not digressions at all — they are the mechanism by which the psychological portraits achieve their depth. Reading it carefully changes how you read any long fiction afterward.”Tyler Cowen