Sold as a pair: Richard Bach’s cult classics about transcendence, freedom, and the mild insanity of wanting more than the life you’re handed.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull (annotated copy by a charming person in Year 8) — the parable of a seagull who refuses the limits of his flock and pursues perfection in flight. The photos are enough to make owning a copy of this worth it. Evidence of prior obsession: someone really read this one, which suits the book’s reputation as a gateway to self-reinvention. At 13 might be a problem, wonder where they are now.

Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah — a companion novel about a messiah who would rather live quietly but keeps being dragged back into meaning-making. Clean interior, unmarked.

Together they read like two sides of the same argument. Transcend or opt out; accelerate or disappear.