What books does Veeky Forums think I should read in my journey towards self-discovery and happiness...

What books does Veeky Forums think I should read in my journey towards self-discovery and happiness? Topics such as the meaning of life, what it means to be human and the achievement of happiness have always interested me, but it seems overwhelming to go on that journey alone, so I'm asking more experienced anons for some good starting books.

Plato -- all works
Aristotle -- ethics, metaphysics
Meditations -- Marcus Aurelius
Holy Bible
Chronicles of Narnia --C.S. Lewis

Just read religious literature and some entry level philosophy (higher stuff is depressing and pretty autistic). But in the end anything you read is going to be vain self-help. You need to fundamentally rethink your life and meditate on why you're unhappy.

Look, kid (and you are a kid) the fact is that whatever idealogical anchor you choose to weigh you down and stop you sailing adrift from the shore of society will be one which serves to do one thing: keep you alive. Everything is subjective, it's just a matter of deciding whose subjective opinion you intend to value most. Chances are it will be the vaguely paternal figure who is always lurking just outside your peripheral vision. You're going to spend decades working 9-5, probably longer, at some job that you will either convince yourself that you enjoy or which you will hate travelling to each morning. Either way this job will wear you down, undermine your capacity to stay true to your instincts and principles, and leave you at best a smiling, peppy, functional cog in the system. There is no "meaning" in life. We're a species possessing self-awareness and the abilities allowed by that particular evolutionary quirk. Since most of us don't enjoy living like other animals we have constructed over time urban areas whose maintenance alone requires most citizens to sacrifice the majority of their day for it sake. As an innately discontented species always tapping our toes to improve things (or, rather, "improve") the system has grown and proliferated so intensely that the only happiness that you, as an obscure, anonymous member will find is by leaning to appreciate the system, allow your will to be shaped so that it meets the demands of the system, channel your brutish impulse to mate into a marriage, find validation in the desire to be masculine by raising children and being the head of your family, and praise forevermore the virtues of convenience, comfort, consensus and optimism.

Thanks, user. I'll have a look at Aurelius' works.

Be really, really, really open and don't try to pin down your understanding of the universe according to some crystallised worldview, especially as mediated through other people. Real philosophy is really hard and has an extremely steep learning curve, and for 99% of the people who try to practice it, the farthest they will get will be the front gate, only seeing the yard and never really exploring the inside.

To really practice philosophy you have to expand your own epistemic horizon and fundamentally transform your consciousness and ways of encountering the world. This doesn't happen by evaluating propositional content from books or having it summarised for you by someone else. It happens from tapping into the worldview of an author and realising his thinking was so different from yours that your actual means of experiencing reality has expanded, in a way that was completely and fundamentally unpredictable from your starting position.

If you want to grapple with some of the most important philosophical systems currently ongoing, you're going to have to come to terms with modern German philosophy, which means coming to terms at least to some extent with the Western philosophical tradition in general.

The real moments of realisation won't be when you read Plato. They'll be when you read Plato for the 2.5th time after having it explained to you by another book, allegorically described to you in a way that makes it click for the first time by Thomas Mann, and then finally cemented in place so that you're ready to understand it by something incidental that you never could have foreseen. That's how real epiphanies happen.

Zhuangzi
Enchiridion
The Book on the Taboo About Knowing Who You Really Are

The Satanic Bible

Gilgamesh
Tao Te Ching
On the Good Life
Meditations
Literature from the Bible
Confessions of Augustine
Shakespeare
Stories and Poems of Oscar Wilde
Family Happiness and Other Stories
Stories of Kafka
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Little Prince
Wind Sand and Stars
The Stranger
The Plague
The Book on the Taboo

Perhaps you'll discover self-hate, at best. But you won't be enlightened because you've read a few books. There's a high likelihood you'll become an insufferable hipster like most of Veeky Forums though.

Epictetus - Handbook (Enchiridion)
Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince
Plato - Republic
The works of Goethe
The works of Shakespeare
The works of Kafka
The works of Orwell