What inspired this question for me was reading Alex Haley’s “Roots” after having just read “Beloved” by Toni Morrison. I thought that the two taken together give a wonderfully detailed image of American slavery and it’s effects on the body (Roots) as well as on the soul (Beloved).
Another that came to mind was Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” and Hunter S Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” as I personally felt that FaL was written as a direct parody and skewering of the kind of transcendentalist optimism we see in someone like Kerouac.
I guess I’m thinking of books that look at similar issues from complimentary angles or books that seem heavily inspired by others and almost responding or expounding, so that you come away having learned more than the sum of their parts.
EDIT: Doesn’t have to be all fiction. Non-fiction is welcome as well.
High-Rise (sometimes High Rise sans hyphen) by J.G. Ballard and The Politics of Experience by R.D. Laing. When I read the former, the latter struck me as an incredibly obvious and blatant lens to read it through, but the scholarship is somewhat absent there.
It could be because the former is a somewhat under-read thriller and the latter is the magnum opus of a decidedly fringe psychiatrist? I read Laing for an existential psychology course, but I can’t speak to his broader influence within the field. I’ve spent enough of my life explaining I am not a psychologist that I’ve never really looked into the currents and eddies at work within psychology. That said, what I know of his work feels remarkably contemporary.