Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Brainiac's bedside table, 2d edition, cont.

I've got a few more March books here that I'd like to share. I haven't read every word, but they look very good so far. I promise, I'm not praising every book that crosses my desk. These are the select handful of new titles that have made it through my rigorous filtering process. Check them out:

"Socrates in Love: Philosophy for a Passionate Heart" (Norton), by Christopher Phillips. Phillips is a very impressive figure, a world-travelling philosopher about whom I've written a few times before; he's started philosophy cafes -- grassroots discussion groups that approach philosophy as a tool for living -- in jails, hospitals, nursing homes, even in cafes. His books "Socrates Cafe" and "Six Questions of Socrates" demonstrate how ordinary people without any expert philosophical training could reason their way toward something like enlightenment, simply by asking better and better questions. Here, Phillips dispels notions that rational thought and passion don't mix as he communes about love (love of family, love of strangers, love between friends, selfless love, love of country, love of God, love of life, love of wisdom) with everyone you can imagine, from soldiers to homeless children to maximum-security prison inmates to Katrina refugees to South Africans celebrating the 10th anniversary of apartheid to Belfast residents on Easter Sunday. The book offers no answers; that's not the point. The idea is to get us thinking -- but be careful! Unlike listening to The Shins's "New Slang," thinking deeply really might change your life.

"Jamestown: A Novel" (Soft Skull), by Matthew Sharpe. In January, James Parker wrote, in an Ideas column on Cormac McCarthy's new novel "The Road" and the Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron's movie "Children Of Men," that these post-apocalyptic and dystopian narratives share a preoccupation: "The search for something to live by, a principle or perspective that will clarify present suffering." It's difficult to believe that the same might be true of Sharpe's non-earnest novel, set in a not-too-distant future that recapitulates, in a twisted way, America's colonial past. America is ravaged, the environment is exhausted, and the ruler of Manhattan sends colonists in one of those "Gauntlet"-style armored schoolbuses to Jamestown, Virginia, where they meet up with a Native American gal named Pocahontas and attempt to exploit her tribe. Hijinks ensue. So how can Sharpe's black humor (he's a very funny writer, in the best kind of nihilistic way) exist in the same book as such un-hilarious things as hope, optimism, redemption, joy? I hear they're in there, and I intend to find them; this novel looks right up my Damnation Alley.

"Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers" (Anchor), ed. Alane Salierno Mason, Dedi Felman, and Samantha Schnee. In 2003, I was excited to hear about the launch of Words Without Borders, a website dedicated to literature in translation. It's important for Americans to read international literature, but that's not a sufficient argument for actually doing so. The literature we read should also be engaging, enjoyable, charming, fascinating, troubling -- or why bother reading? I'm happy to report, after a few hours on a train, that the stories in this collection, translated from Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, Bengali, Persian, Arabic, Yoruba, Romanian, Bosnian, Italian, German, French, Norwegian, and Spanish, and individually introduced by Jonathan Safran Foer, Ha Jin, Wole Soyinka, Gunter Grass, Jose Saramago, and many other litterateurs, aren't merely worth reading, they're fun and exciting to read. Dress warmly: You're headed to the frontiers of new literature.

UPDATE: Right after I wrote this entry, I sat down and read the 1st 100 pages of "Jamestown." Excellent, so far!

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 01:25 PM

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