Courtsey - The Wall Street Journal
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'The Year of the Hare' is only the most Finnish, and perhaps most antically Zen-ish, of a shelf-load of books that tell us to find and live by our own ideas of contentment. Here are a few other memorable summonses to a new life:
The Moon and Sixpence By Somerset Maugham (1919)
Maugham may have looked and sounded like an upstanding member of the British ruling classes, but all his books are about a longing to escape—through romance or mysticism if not downright flight. In this, one of the greatest of his novels, he tweaks the story of Gauguin's journey to send a British stockbroker to a richer life in Tahiti. Maugham was the rare soul who knew both cosmopolitan society and the runaway's life—and how the latter could somehow complete the trajectory of the former.
Walden By Henry David Thoreau (1854)
He traveled only a mile and a quarter from Concord's railroad station; he stayed in his cabin only two years, two months and two days; and he held mass anti-slavery meetings there, while also taking off for excursions to Maine (and jail). But the details don't matter. What Thoreau shows us is how easy it is to step off the grid, think more carefully about our choices, and live a little closer to our senses and truest needs. A man is rich, he knew, 'in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to leave alone.'
Eat, Pray, Love By Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)
This book has become so popular and so widely envied that it's hard to see it clearly. But Ms. Gilbert won seven million readers mostly by exploring, with unusual intelligence and wit, something many of us feel: Why stick around in New York, writing articles and drifting between partners who don't entirely fulfill you, when there's a whole wide world to explore? The beauty of this memoir is that she is honest enough to know her story sounds like cliché, even as she is open, warm and wise enough to find a new life, a clearer sense of herself and, yes, a new husband.
A Journey in Ladakh By Andrew Harvey (1983)
Harvey held a sinecure fellowship at Oxford—the youngest to win such in the university's 800-year history—when he took off for an almost unvisited corner of the Himalayas in northern India. The people and places he met in Ladakh proved so eye-opening that he left Oxford, became a full-time mystic and, in the 30 years since, has published dozens of books on Christianity, Sufism, Buddhism and much else.
As You Like It By William Shakespeare (1599)
The characters in many of Shakespeare's last plays, culminating in 'The Winter's Tale' and 'The Tempest,' find that, once exiled (however reluctantly) from their homes, everything feels like a holiday. But even in this much earlier comedy, the exiled protagonists lose their fixed identities in wandering—and promptly find themselves in the company of clowns and zanies who might have stolen right out of 'The Year of the Hare.' 'And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything,' says the Duke, sounding startlingly similar to Vatanen.
(To lovers of 'A Burnt-Out Case' by Graham Greene, of 'Steppenwolf' by Hermann Hesse, of 'The Seven Storey Mountain' by Thomas Merton, and of all the many other books—'Playing With Water' by James Hamilton-Paterson!—that could be here, I apologize. They all could change your life.)
—Pico Iyer
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