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Deep within an essay On the Art of Thinking for Oneself, Schopenhauer has four novels to recommend his readers. Of course, they are each in a different language... He also gives us objective, measurable standards to judge the artistic merit of a novel. Schopenhauer looks at how much a novel deals with the inner life -- the more it deals with the inner life of the protagonist, the more artistic a novel becomes because it's the inner world that excites our interest - not the outer world of representation. Schopenhauer's recommended reading list: 1) Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne () 2) Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse by Jean-Jacques Rousseau () 3) Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe () 4) Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes ()
