Only tangentially related to the article, but: if you haven't read any Beckett, you owe it to yourself to check out at least Waiting for Godot and Endgame, two relatively short plays that alternate nicely between black comedy and surreal despair.

Agreed. Though I would recommend that anyone attempting to read "Waiting for Godot" first start by reading about the philosophy of the absurd, and early 20th-century artistic movements like Dada and surrealism. Those are the very basic keys you need to understand the work of Beckett, that is work that remains opaque to the viewer/reader unless they do some groundwork.

It is a play, yes.

> I didn't mean all themes had to be in one work.

Oh, in that case...I can recommend so much. It'd take way too long.

Here are a few, off the top of my head:

The First Man by Albert Camus (novel)

The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde (short story)

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (play)

If you want something challenging, try Cervantes' Don Quixote.

What the hell. Here's my list of literature everyone should at least try (in no particular order):

Homer: both the Iliad and Odyssey

Sophocles: Oedipus the King (read it - far better than you might think)

Plato: The Apology of Socrates

Sappho's fragmentary poems (the translation by Anne Carson titled If not, winter is especially good)

Dante: Inferno

Shakespeare: at least one tragedy, one history, one comedy and one of the final "problem plays"

John Donne: a bunch but if none else Elegy XIX To His Mistress Going to Bed

Philip Larkin: he didn't write much; read the complete poems (if nothing else, look at "Born yesterday")

T.S. Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Return of the Magi", "Hollow men"

Ernest Hemmingway: A Clean Well-Lighted Place

Herman Melville: Bartleby, the Scrivener

Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent

Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary

George Orwell: Any and all of the essays, but especially "Shooting an elephant" and "A hanging"

Stendahl: Red and Black

James Joyce: A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man

Andre Dumas: The Three Musketeers

Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

I'll shut up, except to say that although I agree with some of the people on the thread that reading "great books" just because they're considered great is stupid, these books were all a joy. I remember them each pretty happily and return to a few of them now and again and just browse through for awhile. Some "great" books really are great, and if you're reading for yourself (not as a forced assignment), they're often well worth the effort (because, yes, none of them reads like a magazine article).

Maybe, but I can tell you I got nothing from reading "Waiting for Godot" as a sophomore in high school. Age is something that is hard to relate to when your 14-15. Worse philosophy tends to be a luxury when your really poor and have more immediate concerns. I might have been offended by being called "emotionally immature" at that age but i also found Jane Eyre and similar to be pointless rubbish at that age.

Although, maybe the point of a "classic" is that it should have broad appeal, but there is a difference between intellectually understanding something and being able to relate to it. I found Grapes of Wrath to be relatable, but tedious in high school, and noticed a correlation a between the amount of hate better off kids in class espoused for it vs the fact that I while I found it immensely depressing, I didn't mind it nearly as much as many of the other assignments.

Reminds me of "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett...

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett

Getting into a habit of exercise is the obvious answer. A less conventional advice that has sometimes worked for me is to totally embrace the feeling of being somber, and binge on some of the classic sort of miserable apathetic existentialist books. Things like Albert Camus' The Stranger, Sartre's Nausia, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. Sometimes after I have read those works, after I have stopped trying to ignore the feeling and just went all in for a few days, do I even get bored with being miserable and then start to look for other emotions to experience, and usually they're a lot happier in flavour. Obviously this advice could also exacerbate the problem, so try it at your own risk.

That was a 1950s thing. "Death of a Salesman", "Krapp's Last Tape", "Waiting for Godot", and most of Harold Pinter's works. They're either about depression, or after you watch them, you'll be depressed.

Tom Lehrer on this, in the 1960s: "The characters in these books and plays and so on spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up."