Summer Reading 2011

John Perry

Each year Ken and I together with our listeners, previous guests, and special guests, come up with a number of suggestions for summer reading.  The books don’t have to be philosophy books, but they should have a philosophical angle.  So the categories come down to philosophically interesting fiction, philosophically relevant non-fiction, and straight philosophy.

This year our special guest is John McMurtrie, book critic at the San Francisco Chronicle.  John had a host of recommendation — book critics read a lot of books.  They are all listed on our website, along with all of the other suggestions we got.  The two we discussed at some length with John are:
Garry Wills, Augustine’s Confessions: A Biography.
T.C. Boyle, When the Killing’s Done.
 
I was happy to learn of a new book on Augustine by Garry Wills, always an engaging writer. It’s a good idea to read or reread the Confessions, or at least the first nine books, while reading what Wills has to say.  Boyle’s book sounds like a mystery novel, but its really built around the moral issues involved in ridding some of California’s Channel Islands of non-native species.
My suggestions were books by Bernhard Schlink, author of The Reader; that book was on a previous year’s list, and the movie based on it won a Dionysus Award.  I’ve read and liked some of Schlink’s mystery novels; the detective is named `Self’, so the titles are things like Self’s Deception.  His novel The Homecoming picks up themes of memory and guilt found in The Reader.  And finally his book Guilt About the Past consists at lectures he gave at Oxford, which direct these issues directly, or at least philosophically.
Ken plans to read only short books this Summer, fitting his reading into spaces left by his own writing and his baseball coaching duties.  His choices: Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms;  Troy Jollimore, At Lake Scugog: Poems;and Robert Rowland Smith,  Breakfast with Socrates: An Extraordinary (Philosophical) Journey Through Your Ordinary Day.  Don’t miss Ken reading one of Troy Jollimore’s great poems on the show.

Two authors and former guests talked about books they have just finished.  Psychiatrist and novelist Irv Yalom’s The Spinoza Problem sounds like it will be a great read, but it won’t be in bookstores for this Summer; put it high on your list for next Summer.

Helen Fisher, the biological anthropologist told us about her latest book Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love; the theory she develops in this books and her earlier Why Him? Why Her?: How to Find and Keep Lasting Love may help you use science to make good decisions (or understand bad ones).

Geoff Nunberg was enthusiastic about a book by another Berkeley prof, Martin Jay’sThe Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics.  The subtitle at least makes this sound like a pretty huge topic, but the books comes in at just over 200 pages and Nunberg says it’s a good read; might be a good warm up for appreciating the upcoming election season.

Other books we had a chance to discuss with listeners:

Noam Shpancer, The Good Psychologist
William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
Leo Tolstoy, The Devil
by Jorge Luis Borges, The Tower of Babel
Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature
Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place

All the books we discuss, plus a number suggested by guests and listeners that we didn’t get a chance to discuss, will be listed on our website when the show is archived, in about a week.

Listen to the Episode

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