Books like Paradise Lost

If Paradise Lost stayed with you, these share its feel: freedom, awe and ambition. Each comes with a real page, so you can tell in a minute.

About Paradise Lost · John Milton

1.The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas, 1844

Also defiance and freedom. A young sailor is betrayed on his wedding day and spends fourteen years in prison. Then he returns, rich and unrecognisable, to dismantle the lives of the men who put him there.

Sight and hearing were the only senses remaining, and they, like two solitary sparks, remained to animate the miserable body which seemed fit for nothing but the grave; it was only, however, by means of one of these senses that he could reveal the thoughts and feelings that still occupied his mind, and the look by which he gave expression to his inner life was like the distant gleam of a candle which a traveller sees by night across some desert place, and knows that a living being dwells beyond the silence and obscurity.
2.Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell

Dante Alighieri, 1320

Also awe and grief. A man lost in a dark wood is led down through nine circles of Hell, and the poet gives every sinner a voice, a grievance and a reason you half understand.

Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang;Ye were not made to live like unto brutes,But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.’So eager did I render my companions,With this brief exhortation, for the voyage,That then I hardly could have held them back.And having turned our stern unto the morning,We of the oars made wings for our mad flight,Evermore gaining on the larboard side.
3.Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad, 1899

Also awe and freedom. A riverboat captain in the Congo tells of a journey that strips away the idea of civilization, and of the eloquent man he went to find.

Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.
4.Beowulf

Beowulf poet, 1000

Also awe and grief. A hall under nightly siege, a stranger who volunteers to face the thing in the dark, and a poet who makes boasting, grief and fate sound like weather. The oldest English epic.

He often permitteth the mood-thought of man of The illustrious lineage to lean to possessions, 80 Allows him earthly delights at his manor, A high-burg of heroes to hold in his keeping, Maketh portions of earth-folk hear him, And a wide-reaching kingdom so that, wisdom failing him, He himself is unable to reckon its boundaries; 85 He liveth in luxury, little debars him, Nor sickness nor age, no treachery-sorrow Becloudeth his spirit, conflict nowhere, No sword-hate, appeareth, but all of the world doth Wend as he wisheth; the worse he knoweth not, 90 Till arrant arrogance inward pervading, Waxeth and springeth, when the warder is sleeping, The guard of the soul: with sorrows encompassed, Too sound is his slumber, the slayer is near him, Who with bow and arrow aimeth in malice.
5.Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë, 1847

Also defiance and freedom. An orphan with no money, no beauty and a ferocious sense of her own worth takes a job at a strange house. A first-person voice that still feels startlingly direct.

No sooner did I see that his attention was riveted on them, and that I might gaze without being observed, than my eyes were drawn involuntarily to his face; I could not keep their lids under control: they would rise, and the irids would fix on him. I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,—a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless.
6.Thus Spake Zarathustra

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883

Also awe and defiance. A prophet comes down from the mountain to tell you your values were borrowed, your comfort is a cage, and you could become something else.

O man! Take heed!What saith deep midnight’s voice indeed?“I slept my sleep—,“From deepest dream I’ve woke, and plead:—“The world is deep,“And deeper than the day could read.“Deep is its woe—,“Joy—deeper still than grief can be:“Woe saith: Hence! Go!“But joys all want eternity—,“—Want deep, profound eternity!”
7.Antigone

Sophocles, -441

Also defiance and grief. A young woman defies a new king to bury her brother, and discovers how much a city will sacrifice to enforce its own order.
8.The Iliad

Homer, -750

Also awe and grief. A war stalled outside a city, a commander's wounded pride, and the best fighter in the army refusing to fight. Seven weeks of rage, grief and armour.
9.The Importance of Being Earnest

Oscar Wilde, 1895

Also defiance and freedom. Two friends invent imaginary relatives to escape their obligations, and their inventions collide in one country house full of people who talk in epigrams.
10.Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864

Also freedom and defiance. A furious, funny, self-lacerating monologue from a Petersburg clerk who argues that freedom begins where reason and self-interest end.
11.Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience

Henry David Thoreau, 1854

Also freedom and defiance. A two-year experiment in living cheaply beside a pond, written as a running argument with your own busyness, your possessions, and the life you assumed you had to lead.
12.Romeo and Juliet

William Shakespeare, 1597

Also grief and freedom. Two teenagers from feuding families fall in love over three days, and the adults around them keep choosing sides.