There are 1,000 places to see before you die, 100 books you should read in your lifetime, and countless lists of things to do before your time is up. But what about books you should read while you’re in prison, a place where time is all you have?
Incarceration is one of the great problems of modern society. Historically, Jewish law was reluctant to use imprisonment as a form of punishment, and it was rarely done. In ancient Jewish tradition, penalties for wrongdoing were more often monetary, corporal or connected to restitution. Parallel communities were created where the wrongdoers could live and otherwise have a normal life. The idea of locking someone away for years, sometimes decades, simply to serve time was not central to the system and was not coded in biblical law.
Today, people can spend tens of years behind bars for acts they can never undo. Whatever remorse they may feel, whatever changes they make to themselves, the clock continues to tick. Whether prison gives people a meaningful opportunity to repent, repair their lives and return to society is a discussion for another day.
But books might be a place to begin. After recently putting together a list of featured children’s books from the independent Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which we visited, I came across something else on social media: a collection of books connected to prison reading.
Harvard Book Store is one of those places that makes you feel smarter simply by walking through the door. It sits just outside Harvard University’s gates, independently owned and operated, and has the sort of creaky rooms, low ceilings and labyrinthine corners that make you want to get lost for an afternoon.
You get the sense that some of the smartest people on the planet have wandered through those rooms, worked there, recommended books or contributed to the conversations taking place between its shelves.
And so, in the spirit of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, here is a different kind of reading list: Books for people who have time but perhaps not freedom. Books for people whose resources are limited, whose worlds have become very small, or who simply need somewhere else to go in their minds.
Maybe a book will be redemptive. Maybe it will offer some understanding of the world, or of ourselves. Maybe it will just help pass another long afternoon.
1. A Court of Thorns and Roses — Sarah J. Maas
A young huntress is taken into a magical world after killing a wolf. A fantasy about love, power and survival, where nothing is quite what it seems.
2. The 1619 Project — Nikole Hannah-Jones
A provocative reexamination of American history through the legacy of slavery. It asks readers to reconsider how a nation tells its own story and whose voices have been left out.
3. Gender Queer — Maia Kobabe
An illustrated memoir about growing up, identity and finding the language to describe who you are. A deeply personal book that has also become a flashpoint in America’s battles over censorship.
4. Looking for Alaska — John Green
A teenager leaves home for boarding school, where friendship, love and tragedy change his understanding of life. A book about the people who enter our lives and never quite leave us.
5. Between the World and Me — Ta-Nehisi Coates
Written as a letter to his teenage son, this powerful book examines race, fear and the experience of living in a Black body in America. An intimate meditation on history, injustice and what we pass on to our children.
Three years ago on Reddit, a lively discussion popped up: someone was looking for advice on what books to send a 31-year-old in prison. Shawshank Redemption came up. The Count of Monte Cristo. Salem’s Lot, or To Kill a Mockingbird, as though the person in prison should be forever redemptive or contemplating the thing that he probably wants to escape from. One wrote as an antidote, “Neal Stephenson novels are escapist adventure stories and are usually ridiculously long. I think if I was in prison, the longer I could escape into one story, the more effective that escape would be.”
5 more books to read in prison, recommended by Reddit reader
A lively Reddit discussion asked what books people would recommend sending to a 31-year-old man in prison. The question attracted 186 comments, ranging from literary classics to science fiction and philosophy.
Here are five recommendations that offer adventure, humor, wisdom and an escape into other worlds.
1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams
When Earth is demolished to make way for an interstellar highway, an ordinary Englishman is swept into a wildly absurd journey through space. Funny, philosophical and wonderfully imaginative, it’s a reminder that the universe is stranger than anything we can imagine.
2. The Lord of the Rings — J.R.R. Tolkien
An epic journey through Middle-earth exploring friendship, courage, temptation and sacrifice. Tolkien creates an entire world with its own languages, histories and landscapes, offering readers an extraordinary place to disappear into.
3. Moby-Dick — Herman Melville
Captain Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of a white whale becomes a sweeping meditation on nature, madness, ambition and fate. One Reddit reader joked that the novel was “long as hell,” which might be part of its appeal.
4. The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway
An aging Cuban fisherman battles an enormous marlin far out at sea. Hemingway’s short masterpiece explores endurance, human dignity and the determination to keep going even when the odds are impossible.
5. Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor E. Frankl
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl explores how human beings find meaning amid extreme suffering, drawing on his experiences during the Holocaust. A profound examination of purpose, resilience and the power of choosing how we respond to life’s circumstances.
