Stories worth thinking about

Book shop

These are the stories that stayed with me long after I finished them. Most of them circle the same few questions: what makes us human, what we owe each other, what faith is for, and how much of reality we can trust.

Books first, then films, then TV. I'll keep adding to the list as I find new ones.

Books

Master and Margarita book and a cat

  1. The Master and Margarita (1967), Mikhail Bulgakov. The Devil visits Soviet Moscow, in a story woven together with a novel about Pontius Pilate.
  2. The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Fyodor Dostoevsky. Three brothers, a murdered father, and a long argument about faith, doubt, and moral responsibility.
  3. Crime and Punishment (1866), Fyodor Dostoevsky. A poor student kills a pawnbroker to prove a theory, then has to live with it.
  4. The Trial (1925), Franz Kafka. A man is arrested and prosecuted without ever learning the charge.
  5. Blood Meridian (1985), Cormac McCarthy. A band of scalp hunters on the US-Mexico border in the 1850s, told without mercy.
  6. Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) (1932), Louis-Ferdinand Céline. A disillusioned journey through the First World War, colonial Africa, America, and the Paris suburbs.
  7. Notes from Underground (1864), Fyodor Dostoevsky. A bitter, isolated narrator argues against reason, progress, and himself.
  8. La Chute (The Fall) (1956), Albert Camus. A Parisian lawyer, in an Amsterdam bar, confesses the hypocrisy behind his virtue.
  9. The Road (2006), Cormac McCarthy. A father and son cross a burned-out America with nothing but each other.
  10. Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelley. A scientist creates life, then abandons it.
  11. Never Let Me Go (2005), Kazuo Ishiguro. Students at an English boarding school slowly learn what they were raised for.
  12. East of Eden (1952), John Steinbeck. Two families in California's Salinas Valley retell Cain and Abel across generations.
  13. No Longer Human (1948), Osamu Dazai. A man who feels unable to be human hides behind clowning, until he can't.
  14. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Oscar Wilde. A young man stays beautiful while his portrait records his sins.
  15. Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo) (1844), Alexandre Dumas. A man wrongly imprisoned escapes and spends years planning his revenge.
  16. The Bible (c. 1200 BC to 110 AD), various authors. The source of many of the themes and images in the works on this list.

Movies

Cooper and his daughter from Interstellar

  1. Interstellar (2014), Christopher Nolan. Astronauts search for a new home for humanity while time slips away from the people they left behind.
  2. The Matrix (1999–2003), Lana and Lilly Wachowski. A hacker learns that the world he lives in is a simulation.
  3. Ex Machina (2014), Alex Garland. A programmer is asked to judge whether an AI is conscious.
  4. Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Ridley Scott and Denis Villeneuve. Hunting artificial humans, and asking what separates them from us.
  5. The Truman Show (1998), Peter Weir. A man discovers that his whole life is a TV show.
  6. Her (2013), Spike Jonze. A lonely writer falls in love with an AI operating system.
  7. Prometheus (2012), Ridley Scott. A search for humanity's creators that goes badly wrong.
  8. The Imitation Game (2014), Morten Tyldum. Alan Turing breaks Enigma, and is later prosecuted for being gay.
  9. Oppenheimer (2023), Christopher Nolan. The man who led the building of the atomic bomb, and what came after.
  10. The Passion of the Christ (2004), Mel Gibson. The last twelve hours of the life of Jesus.
  11. Kingdom of Heaven, Director's Cut (2005), Ridley Scott. A blacksmith becomes a knight defending Jerusalem during the Crusades.
  12. Mulholland Drive (2001), David Lynch. A Hollywood dream that slowly turns on the dreamer.

TV Shows

Dolores and Teddy from Westworld

  1. Westworld (2016), Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. The android hosts of a Western theme park start to remember.
  2. Person of Interest (2011), Jonathan Nolan. A surveillance AI predicts crimes, and two men act on what it finds.
  3. Battlestar Galactica (2004), Ronald D. Moore. The last humans flee the machines they built, some of which now look like them.
  4. Devs (2020), Alex Garland. A tech company builds a quantum computer that can see the past and the future.
  5. Mr. Robot (2015), Sam Esmail. A troubled hacker joins a plot to erase the world's debt.
  6. Chernobyl (2019), created by Craig Mazin, directed by Johan Renck. The 1986 disaster, and the lies that made it worse.
  7. Altered Carbon, Season 1 (2018), Laeta Kalogridis. A future where minds can be moved into new bodies, so only the poor really die.
  8. True Detective, Season 1 (2014), created by Nic Pizzolatto, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. Two detectives hunt a ritual killer in Louisiana across seventeen years.
  9. Black Mirror (2011), Charlie Brooker. Standalone stories about technology and what it brings out in us.
  10. The Leftovers (2014), Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta. Two percent of the world's population vanishes, and everyone else has to keep living.
  11. Dark (2017), Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese. Four families in a German town, tangled across time.
  12. The Good Place (2016), Michael Schur. A comedy about the afterlife that is really a course in moral philosophy.
  13. The Chosen (2017), Dallas Jenkins. The life of Jesus, told through the people around him.