Good books for High School graduates

[DrToast]

My nephew is graduating high school this month and I'd like to buy him a book as part of a gift.

Nothing political. Just something about how to live a good life. Also, even though this is the fiction forum, please feel free to chime in with non-fiction, too.

One book I'm thinking about is: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

But I'd love to hear other suggestions? What book do you wish you had read when you were 18?

[Atticus]

1. "The Prophet", by Kahlil Gibran. nt

[Journeyman]

2. I was ready to recommend Frankl as I read your first sentence . . .

Of course, such suggestions would be dependent on his interests. But without knowing that, I'd suggest . . .

Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius

The poetry of T.S. Eliot or Langston Hughes

Essays by Edward Abby (The Best of . . . is a useful collection)

Points for a Compass Rose by Evan S. Connell*

Good luck with your search

*In her review of Points for a Compass Rose in Harper's Magazine, Annie Dillard wrote:

"We have here on the planet with us a man of such courage and strength of spirit that he has not lost what Alfred Adler calls 'the nerve for excellence.' He has kept it despite the burden of an awareness not only of the enormity of his project and of the limitations of his own human understanding, but also of the abject ignorance and indifference of his audience."

"... Somehow Connell makes you care. Many modern poets demand a good deal of work; Connell excites it. Sometimes the note-taker's [narrator] tone is hectoring, even belligerent; if you have any competitive spirit at all, you seize a thread -- any thread -- follow it, and, lo, it traces a pattern. ... you understand at last that these notes are not tentative explorations, and far less are they 'expressions': they are instead the magnificent artifices of a giant intellect."

[if..fish..had..wings]

3. Huxley

The Devils of Loudon by Aldous Huxley

or

Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester

or

The Nazi Seizure of Power by William Sheridan Allen (political, sorry)