Ten books.

Lists of great books tend to be lists of books that someone feels guilty about not having read. This is a different kind of list. The ten titles below share a subject, which is the boundary between what a person can control and what they cannot, and they are here because that subject looks different once you have a job, a mortgage, aging parents or a child. None of them is new, and several were ignored or misread when they first appeared. All of them are in print, and all of them can be borrowed from a public library.

The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway, first appeared complete in a single issue of Life on September 1, 1952, and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Its famous plainness sometimes slides into self-parody, and a reader who arrives expecting profundity will find the repetitions trying. Read as a story about effort that is not rewarded, however, it holds up. Santiago does everything right and still comes home with a skeleton, and the book declines to console him or us.

Stoner, by John Williams, was published in 1965 and sold modestly before falling out of sight. New York Review Books reissued it in 2006, and in 2013 it became a surprise best seller in Europe and was named Waterstones Book of the Year. The novel follows an unremarkable professor through an unremarkable career, a bad marriage and a handful of defeats, and it is devastating precisely because nothing extraordinary happens. It is the best novel we know about work as the place where a quiet life is actually lived.

Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986. It runs to more than 800 pages and is ostensibly about a cattle drive from Texas to Montana, but its real subject is two old friends who have never said what they owe each other. McMurtry had set out to write against the romance of the Western, and readers adopted the book as the romance anyway. Both readings are available, and the tension between them is what keeps it alive.

The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro, won the Booker Prize in 1989, and Ishiguro received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. Its narrator, an English butler, believes that his life of service has been a life of dignity, and the novel lets the reader see, a little before he does, what that belief has cost him. Few books use an unreliable narrator so gently or to such effect.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, was published in 2006 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. A father and son walk south through a burned country with almost nothing, and the father’s control extends only to the boy in front of him. It is McCarthy’s most restrained book and, for many parents, the hardest to finish. Its bleakness is total, which makes its few moments of tenderness land with unusual force.

Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius, was written in Greek during the emperor’s campaigns of the 170s and was never meant to be read by anyone else. That is its great virtue. These are not lessons delivered from a height but notes from a powerful man trying, and often failing, to govern his own temper. The distinction between what is in our power and what is not runs through every page, and no later book on the subject has put it more economically.

Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl, was first published in German in 1946 and in English in 1959. Its first half, an account of Frankl’s years in the Nazi camps, remains extraordinary. Its second half, an introduction to the school of therapy he founded, is drier and more dated. The book’s central claim, that a person stripped of nearly every freedom still keeps the freedom to choose an attitude, is often quoted as uplift. In context it is something harder and more serious.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, who shared the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, came out in 2011. Its account of the fast, intuitive mind and the slow, deliberate one changed how a generation talked about decisions. It should now be read with one caution. Several of the priming studies cited in its fourth chapter have failed to replicate, and Kahneman himself later acknowledged that he had relied too heavily on small studies. The core of the book, much of it built on his own work with Amos Tversky, stands.

Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, a surgeon, was published in 2014. It is about the medical profession’s habit of treating death as a technical failure, and about what patients actually want when time is short, which is often more control over how they live rather than more months. It is the most practically useful book on this list, and the one most readers put off longest.

The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel, was published in 2020. It argues that financial outcomes depend less on intelligence than on behavior, and particularly on the ability to want less than you could have. Its short chapters can feel thin, and it occasionally mistakes an anecdote for a principle. Its central point is sound, however, and it is refreshingly free of the promise that anyone can get rich.

At twenty pages a night, ten books take well under a year. Alternating a novel with a book of argument keeps the list from turning into homework. Start with the Hemingway, which is short enough for a weekend, and save Lonesome Dove for a winter month, when a long book feels like company. Many public libraries in the United States lend ebooks and audiobooks through a free app called Libby, and placing holds on the next two titles when you begin the first keeps the list moving.

If a book has not taken hold after fifty pages, put it down without guilt. The point of the list is not completion. It is to spend a year in the company of writers who took seriously the question of how much of a life is ours to steer, and who answered it more honestly than most of what competes for our evenings.